So I've Heard

The Sound Ringing Forth

Years of listening to his symphonies through Hollywood Bowl amplification can leave you with a distorted sound image of Tchaikovsky’s remarkable orchestral language – what old Bernheimer used to refer to as the “slush pump.” The Fourth Symphony doesn’t seem to fare well indoors either, rendered unpopular these days by its excessive popularity. It had been years since I had heard it in its proper setting, until two weeks ago at Disney Hall, which may explain why it sounded so good. Stéphane Denève was the conductor.

A string player explained what is special about the Tchaikovsky sound: a way of layering the string scoring that lets in air and light. Whatever the means, the orchestral sound under Denève, bolstered by his fine sense of shape, made uncommonly good sense of Tchaikovsky’s wayward symphonic meanderings. It filled the hall with a great and novel experience that turned his moldy old Fourth into something brand-new and even, dare I say, wonderful.

Being French, M. Denève seemed possessed of that admirable ideal of clarity and balance that we hang on all French musicians from Boulez on down. His guest shot began with a generous serving of orchestral excerpts from Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges and the last of Bela Bartók’s three piano concertos, with the marvelous Piotr Anderszewski as soloist. Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto may not challenge the fingers as do the first two; he wrote it for his wife Ditta, of lovely but modest talent. By the same token, it challenges the poet all the more. Winner of the 2002 Gilmore Award, that benefice that falls unsolicited from above, and remembered for a spectacular follow-up recital at Disney last season, young Anderszewski continues on his upward path.

The Sound Suppressed

By his exuberant extracurricular activities, James Conlon has virtually redefined the function of a major municipal opera company and its music director: not merely to present the masterworks of the repertory on a large stage in grandiose productions, but to attend to operatic creativity as it has been practiced in a far broader sense and to make this broad sphere, too, the responsibility of the major company. Obviously, there are many more directions for such a passion to extend than one person’s sympathies can embrace, but already, in his first season here, Conlon’s range of activity has been phenomenal: four main-stage productions, the Noah’s Flood at the Cathedral and, this past week, the inaugural of the long-term project known as “Recovered Voices.” All that, plus his willingness to take over as pre-event lecturer at all his activities – and the fact that everything he has done so far has been well done. This is what you call a mensch, Irish kid from Queens or no.

“Recovered Voices” actually began here a couple of seasons ago, when Conlon put together Viktor Ullmann’s concentration-camp opera The Emperor of Atlantis at a local synagogue. The term embraces not only music composed under imprisonment but music whose composers’ lives were in some way affected under Nazi rule, Jewish or (as with Ernst Krenek or Paul Hindemith) not. Last week’s concert, with singers on the empty Chandler Pavilion stage against a projected backdrop with Conlon and the orchestra in the pit, was all-operatic: selections from five operas plus a complete performance of Alexander Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy. All was music composed in German-speaking Europe, almost all in the 1920s.

Six composers, neighbors more or less, worked to restart their art in a land shattered, at least economically and psychologically, after a devastating war. Music itself had reached ground zero. Mahler was gone; the symphony, bulwark of a century of concert-hall music, had run its course. Only opera, under Richard Strauss and, briefly, Franz Schreker, flourished, perpetuating a style that claimed its ancestry from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde 60 years before, uneasily blended with Viennese kitsch and the Mediterranean weep. Some clumsy experiments with the newfangled American jazz provided a feeble enlivening force. For subject matter, these composers drew on the symbolism of the painters to the north. In the cabarets, a livelier style flourished; Marlene Dietrich danced, and the piano was played by men who would later become the first generation of Hollywood’s composers: Franz Wachsmann (later Waxman), Fritz (Fred) Hollander. Kurt Weill heard their music and Bertolt Brecht fashioned some of their lyrics, and together they created the musical drama that gives the era its real distinction.

Their music, too, incurred the wrath of Hitler’s goons, but it had leapt to international fame before the formulators of the “Degenerate Music” had pulled down the bars. The music in last week’s concert was entirely noble in the fact of its existence – Ullmann’s opera especially, whose ironic undertones have earned it frequent complete performances these days – and in its perpetuation. Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf is, if nothing else, a social phenomenon, the first opera to employ jazz, and popular for just that. (As students in Vienna, we all smoked Jonnys – cigarettes, that is.) But the jazz is corny and the sentiment worse, as a Long Beach Opera staging proved not so long ago. Korngold’s Die tote Stadt has unaccountably wriggled itself into the repertory, probably on the strength of its composer’s movie fame, although I’m willing to bet you could fashion a better opera out of his score for Kings Row than this hopeless goo.

Then there is Alexander Zemlinsky, whose one-act, hourlong A Florentine Tragedy was given complete in concert form. Zemlinsky has his champions. People were raving a few years ago when a disc of his Second Quartet appeared; I was not of their number, nor was I when the Philharmonic took up his Lyric Symphony, which merely seems the grandmother of all film scores. Florentine, to an ironic Oscar Wilde text ending in a juicy murder, is stronger stuff, especially down in the orchestra pit. Next season, we get his The Dwarf.

Not one of these works on this thoroughly fascinating and valuable program is meant to push aside any of our common fund of music. There is no set limit to the size or number of the active repertory. If I heard no new masterpieces, perhaps I heard a few more criteria for valuing the ones I already know. Reason enough.

Potpourri

To San Francisco I journey for John Adams’ music; it is his shrine. Last season, his Doctor Atomic at the Opera House celebrated the blotting out of the sun; this past weekend, A Flowering Tree at Davies Symphony Hall celebrated its restoration. Peter Sellars, who supplied the words for both major events, was on hand both times, beguiling early arrivals with what has become, for him, not so much a pre-event lecture as an evangelical sermon, eyes wide shut, fortissimo to pianissimo. The crowd, at least on Saturday night, exploded. Ah, San Francisco.

First staged as part of a festival organized by Sellars in Vienna last year (to honor Mozart, you might know, by not playing a note of his music but observing his spirit indirectly), the work was brought to San Francisco with the staging cut down but the gorgeous power of its narrative maintained. An impoverished maiden transforms herself into a tree whose blossoms’ fragrance enchant a prince. He marries her, but her jealous sister destroys her beauty. Both the maiden and her prince journey the world in broken state; a miracle reunites them. It is a kind of love story often retold; this version is from south India, and its overtones are not all that far from Mozart’s Magic Flute. Mostly, it deals with the motivating force of myth – transformation – and that becomes the strength of Adams’ extraordinary score.

His performing forces, which he conducted, are large: full symphony orchestra plus, of course, all the percussion you can name of Eastern and Western worlds, including an exquisite array of metal chimes that put Davies Hall’s own ugly Erector Set décor to shame. Against this barrage there is – of course, this being John Adams – an exquisite array of small sounds: recorders, small glockenspiels, wind chimes and the like that gave the effect of a whole ‘nother world. Frankly, I felt the sound spectrum of A Flowering Tree sloped somewhat more toward the large sound; the gorgeous colors, on first hearing, tended now and then to run. But only now and then. The story is told in English; a chorus comments, rudely at times, in folksy Spanish.

George Tsypin’s original Vienna production used that amazing chorus from Carácas that erupts with such pizzazz on the recording of the Osvaldo Golijov Pasión (and sang it live twice in lucky Costa Mesa). Whatever those young singers have, it apparently doesn’t translate; the one weakness last weekend was the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. Nicely done up in pastel togs in a balcony, it stomped and shouted the Spanish text, preserving the notion of surrounding the Indian folktale with another folklike level, but did so routinely, and brought things down.

The solo cast, all seen in Vienna, consisted of three singers and three dancers whose movements doubled the emotions of the singers or, you might say, paraphrased their earthly experiences into their extraordinarily subtle and complex dance language. Eric Owens, whose Grendel we may now forgive, was the Storyteller, that eloquent, essential binding force in all exotic drama. Jessica Rivera was the ravishing young Kumudha of the blossoms; we know her from work with the L.A. Opera Workshop and the recordings of Golijov’s Ainadamar and his Pasión. Russell Thomas, new to me, was the passionate Prince.

Surrounding this fine vocal group, and welding themselves to its artistry in a way you’d have to see to feel, were three dancers from the Indonesian Institutes for the Arts in Sukarta. Their exhilarating strength lent an entirely new dimension to the entire passionate creation. Even though little of Tsypin’s production traveled to San Francisco – it will be done complete in London in August, and here in concert form in 2009 – the presence of dancers completed the dimension of the work most thrillingly. There was one (of many, actually, but especially one) moment of haunting beauty in the work; it stays with me still, and my eyes mist as I tell it.

The crippled Kumudha lies helpless. “My eyes,” she remembers, “were like the lotus. My arms had the grace of bamboo.” Across the stage, the sorrowing Prince wanders, lamenting, “I grieve for you, lie lost and sick for you.” Their songs, borne by mute dancers, meet midstage. That’s John Adams.

Purple, StreakedI had not intended to write about Brahms at this length. Hearing all four symphonies in five days should have clogged my pores for weeks, yet here we are. I have no fondness for terms like “meat and potatoes,” at least in musical parlance, but that’s what these performances under Christoph von Dohnanyi actually were: thoroughly wholesome, beautifully balanced, every first flute in coordination with every second. Ending the set was the Second Symphony – some folks’ favorite – and its turgid, strained slow movement with horn solo that is like a paradigm of a tune that meanders onstage with no idea where to go. (Mozart did it better in his Musical Joke.) But that symphony allowed for some good, hefty brass at the close; if the Messrs. Green and company had stood up for their last fanfares and released a flock of white doves into the hall, it would not have been out of place. Strange to relate, but after Brahms, the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony on the same Disney stage this past weekend sounded downright lovable – Tchaikovsky!!

A couple of days following the Brahms orchestral orgy, however, came an appendage to the event that nearly obliged me to swallow every harsh word I have flung at old Onkel Johannes these past weeks. Midway through an all-Brahms chamber concert by Philharmonic members came the Clarinet Quintet, a late work not often heard, music of lavender and deep purple, shot through with burnished-bronze outcries from the solo wind player. Memories of the similarly scored work by Mozart are not out of place; nothing else of Brahms – possibly excepting the trio with French horn – sends forth such immediate waves of deep, penetrating beauty. Well into the slow movement, David Howard’s solo clarinet unwound its slithering melodic line across the musical spectrum; the strings answered with passionate shivers, and their moonstruck conversation continues to echo in my skull days later. That’s Brahms.

Zip

Notes on an uncommonly splendid week at Zipper Concert Hall – and what a valuable asset to musical life that handsome, small room has become!

The second in the reborn Monday Evening Concerts drew an almost-capacity crowd, despite there being not a familiar name on the program. Steven Stucky, who curated, had chosen well; what was most compelling was the spread in styles, from the academic/contrapuntal (James Matheson, Sean Shepherd) to the youthful/kicky (Andrew Norman) to three short works (Philippe Bodin, Ana Lara, Brian Current most of all) in which the voice of an original composer with something important to say could be clearly heard. The performances, by members of XTET led by Donald Crockett, all of them locals, offered further assurance that if it should happen that serious composition manages to survive, it will be properly performed. I particularly liked Current’s Faster Still, the final work, an exhilarating study in changing tempos, with a killer part for solo violin (Movses Pogossian). In our previous chat, Stucky had described the piece as “Elliott Carter writing arpeggios,” which stops short of dealing with the energy of the piece, the startling jolts in its changes of pace. (Alternating Current, perhaps?) The composer lives in Toronto; he is worth watching, even from afar.

The best of Susan Svrcek’s “Piano Spheres” concert the next night dealt with worthwhile nostalgia, music from the ’50s, ’60s or thereabouts in styles bygone but still vivid. She began with our old friend Ingolf Dahl, once of USC: the Sonata Pastorale of 1959, neo-classic, jazzy here and there, thoroughly charming. A set of short works by the great loner Carl Ruggles was just as thoroughly uncharming. Later came a clutch of Polish works: a set of miniatures by Artur Malawski from 1947 and, at the end, the 1953 Sonata No. 2 by Grazyna Bacewicz, powerful, defiant music by one of the most significant composers to break through Stalinist dogma in post-WWII Poland.

On Friday, the Calder Quartet, which has been in residence at the Colburn School this season, drew the largest crowd I’ve ever seen at Zipper, and for good reason. Even more amazing, the near-capacity audience held its absolute silence during the Calder’s stunning performance of the Shostakovich Quartet No. 15, that heartbreaking work constructed of six continuous near-pianissimo movements in a bottomless pit. The crowd was young, some very young, and whoever assembled it should hire themselves out to other organizations in town who present serious concerts of quiet music. The program also included Arcadiana, a set of delicious, slinky bits by Thomas Adès – “each an evocation of paradise,” says the wicked composer, and a perfect comedown from the Shostakovich – as well as the second of Beethoven’s “Razumovsky” Quartets, delivered rather harshly at first (why leave out the first-movement repeat?) but with the slow movement entirely the “contemplation of the starry sky” that Beethoven himself noted. These Calders, all four USC-taught and -mellowed, are ripening into one of our prime resources.

At neither of those last two important events was our Times represented. Wonder what happened to that old expression “newspaper of record.”

Zap

Sooner or later, every opera company must take on Tannhäuser; the good news is that our local company’s responsibility is now behind it. Here’s what you need to know about this production currently at the Chandler. At the Bacchanale, near the start, the stage is full of Wagner’s steamy music, with bodies to match – nude, perhaps, but the lighting makes it difficult to discern, or to care. Out from the pile climbs Tannhäuser – in modern dark suit, red jacket. He walks over to a (!) grand piano, sits and begins his serenade to Venus (properly joined, from the pit, by the solo harp Wagner actually demands). Eventually, Tannhäuser is extruded from the Venusberg and finds himself back on Earth in a snowstorm while a Shepherd nearby sings of the balmy Maytime breezes.

What we have, you know by now, is one of those update jobs – the work this time of director Ian Judge and designer Gottfried Pilz – brought on by the Wagnerian sensory overload, the obsession that his music embodies the philosophies of religion, love, hate, damnation, redemption, dissonance and harmony, and is therefore subject to “anything goes” on the dramatic stage. I can’t imagine a stage spectacle more soporific than Wagner according to the Master’s original designs, and our museums teem with evidence to bear this out. But must the alternative insult the eye? The common sense?

You’d think so, from the recent Kirov Opera excursion to Costa Mesa, and now this Tannhäuser, which delivers Wagner’s perfectly agreeable (if hopelessly naive) early stage piece in a production that violates the word of Wagner’s text as well as its sense, for no discernible reason. Must the second-act “Hall of Song,” greeted for its grandeur in Elisabeth’s interminable aria, turn out an overcrowded hotel lobby with inadequate Sitzplatz for the guests? Whose idea, the drab warehouse setting for Act 3, lit with a kind of neonlike electronic green like the first generation of computer monitors, through which the Pilgrim’s Chorus trudges like zombies?

The music is okay, just okay. Peter Seiffert is the Tannhäuser with the modern mustache and the reedy, accurate voice; you have to wonder at the pheromones in that utterly sexless voice nonetheless capable of mounting that Venusberg. Petra Maria Schnitzer is a melting Elisabeth, Franz Josef Selig, as the Landgrave, a commanding figure in the Franz Josef tradition. Martin Gantner – stooped, spectacled, balding – is an odd casting choice for history’s poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, the romantic figure in Wagner’s script, but his “Evening Star” is curiously moving for all that. Better than any of this is the rousing musical leadership of James Conlon and the magnificent whoop-de-do of the orchestra’s brass contingent when called for. I wonder, though: If Conlon is serious about building a Wagnerian town here, mightn’t a somewhat larger chorus be in order? Just asking.

It is hardly news that Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Philharmonic’s spellbinding music director, draws a turn-away crowd at a personal appearance. The difference, on a recent Thursday night, is that this appearance is without the usual 106-member Philharmonic as backup, and the venue is the Apple Store in the Santa Monica Promenade, with the ever-young musician on hand to demonstrate – nay, celebrate – the ongoing symbiosis between art and technology.

Salonen is there to re-create some of the birth pangs of Helix, his latest orchestral work, whose U.S. premiere the Philharmonic will present on March 30. “The great Russian conductor Valery Gergiev asked me for a piece for a BBC concert to celebrate an organization called The World Orchestra of Peace. I had no idea what kind of composition I could write to celebrate the idea of peace. I called the BBC and they told me to just send along any old composition, and that’s what’s here.”

Helix, like most of Salonen’s recent compositions – like the music of nearly any serious creative artist you can name these days – is the product of a collaboration: the invention of the composer and the software that facilitates turning that invention into the printout that the world receives as a readable, performable score. “There is a terrible loneliness about composing music,” Salonen tells the crowd, “and the software creates the illusion of a dialogue, of somebody else in the room – not composing, but at least telling me that what I’m doing is doable. It makes it possible to dream up symphonies, even operas, while I’m in an airplane or in a hotel room far from home. Then, when I get back I can quickly download those dreams.”

Two English brothers, Ben and Jonathan Finn, developed Salonen’s favored software and then gave it the name of Finland’s most famous composer, Jean Sibelius. “As far as I know,” says Salonen, “I am the first Finnish composer to use Sibelius.” He has plenty of company among fellow composers, though; the Sibelius Web site teems with names: Steve Reich, Michael Tilson Thomas, Lalo Schifrin – and takes a swipe or two at Sibelius’ principal software rival, a program called Finale.

On a big screen at the back of the crowded Apple Store, Salonen gets to demonstrate himself, and Sibelius. The sounds aren’t yet the L.A. Philharmonic, but synthesizers provide a fair likeness. Several measures from the start of Helix are laid out; then, manipulated by software, the notes are altered in length, in duration and through combination. The textures thicken as combinations of notes are played off against themselves. Gradually, the music is transformed from an open-textured exercise into an intensifying, accelerating sound pattern of concentric circles. Over Helix‘s nine-minute duration, the title begins to make sense.

At the end there are questions and, as expected, a certain pandemonium. The age spread is impressive; you get the feeling that the next great symphony might come from a 14-year-old Apple whiz, or from an 82-year-old critic, for that matter. Someone asks the inevitable: How does the program affect the division of his life?

“Anybody can conduct symphony concerts,” answers Esa-Pekka Salonen. “But only I can write my music.”

Immersion, Conversion

“The last 80 years,” writes Ned Rorem in Facing the Night, his latest collection of terse and invigorating personal observations, “have been the sole period in history wherein music of the past takes precedence over the present .?.?. I never go to classical concerts anymore, and I don’t know anyone who does. It’s hard still to care whether some virtuoso tonight will perform the Moonlight Sonata a bit better or worse than another virtuoso performed it last night.”

Either by accident or design, I haven’t actually heard the “Moonlight” for a very long time. With the help of our local band, however, I’ve been able to revisit the Beethoven Nine Symphonies over recent seasons, each of them juxtaposed with a new and different music that obliged me to ponder differences and hear both works in a new light. This weekend and next, I get to revisit the Four of Brahms – as, by coincidence, do audiences at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, Boston’s Symphony Hall and Washington’s Kennedy Center – and have just recovered from the news that the next Disney season kicks off with all seven – count ’em – Sibelius symphonies. I find this delightful, sort of. I have become famous for my out-of-hand deploration of the music of that Finnish master, based on a certain tendency in his music toward thickness and ugliness of sound and pomposity of oratory. Faced with the prospect of this new total immersion, I am now forced to confess that I have never, not once, heard live performances of the Sibelius Third or Sixth symphonies. It would not at all surprise me if I emerged from this Sibelius immersion waving the Finnish banner and chanting Finlandia at full voice. Something similar happened last summer, after all, when a performance of the Violin Concerto, a loathing for which I had often proclaimed, won me over completely at a Hollywood Bowl concert. I’m just as glad, however, it isn’t included on the Philharmonic’s new list.

As with “Beethoven Unbound,” the Brahms series aren’t just any old concert programs. Christoph von Dohnányi is the guest conductor, and his past visits here proclaim him as a uniquely warm-hearted visionary toward the Romantic orchestral repertory. He begins by leveling the playing field – literally, by bringing his podium and all the players down to almost the same level and thereby suggesting a kind of chamber-music-writ-large approach. This seems to clarify and make somewhat gentle what I often find unbearable in Brahmsian orchestration. I find Dohnányi’s Brahms actually almost likable; that’s a new kind of sound, for the Philharmonic and for Onkel Johannes as well.

The Brahmsian structures are awesome: not only the astonishing building up in the finale of the Fourth Symphony but the much more devious – and, in the end, far more elusive – accumulation of shape in the finale of the Second, which, after some 60 years of puzzling out, I’ve only now begun to comprehend. I also admire the marvelous trickery in the Brahms scherzi, every one a magic box of melodic invention. It’s the pure sound of the oratorical Brahms that I cannot abide, least of all in performances in the hard-edged, frenzied Toscanini manner that some critics have tried to pass off as “noble” and “eloquent.” If some high-minded brat of a composer had come at me with the opening of his First Symphony, those insolent drums and the C-minor constipation in the strings and the horns, I’d have been out the door before the 10th bar. Critics must have had stronger constitutions in those days.

Contemporary Hero

Tardily, and with some difficulty, I write of Steve Reich and of Daniel Variations, his most recent large-scale work for chorus and orchestra, which the Los Angeles Master Chorale introduced at Disney Hall in late January. The music sets words from the Book of Daniel and words spoken by Daniel Pearl, the journalist from Encino captured and slain by terrorists in Pakistan. Since the murder, a Daniel Pearl Foundation has come into being; Pearl’s parents, Ruth and Judea, were at the local performance.

All of which makes it difficult to deal along parallel lines with music and circumstance, the more so because of Reich’s much-honored excellence. Daniel Variations is a work for chorus and orchestra, about 25 minutes in length, which follows the layout of the previous You Are (Variations), as well it should; that happens at the moment to be Reich’s extremely successful method of dealing with text, chorus, and the familiar Reich orchestra of keyboards, percussion and small numbers of instruments, all amplified. Not surprisingly, the new work sounds a lot like the earlier piece. That circumstance is bound to detract from the importance of the event, but it should not detract from the excellence of the music. Future performances will surely present Daniel Variations in other contexts than this first time, coupled with You Are (Variations), and that will be the time to write about it as music.

Mahagonny Revisited

No opera company that can come up with this season’s Don Carlo, Poppea and Mahagonny in a single throw can be reckoned below first-rate. On the whole, I will stick to my words of praise for this honorable production of this one-of-a-kind masterpiece; a second visit left me, as at the first time, shaken by the raw strength of the whole. Audra McDonald’s Jenny is, in a word, unmatchable: totally insidious from her first line, oozing poison at every word. I could wish for the elimination of the “Cranes” duet in Act 3, which neither Brecht nor Weill felt wholly comfortable about, but at least she sings it with complete dishonesty. Anthony Dean Griffey is a splendidly goofy Jimmy, and it’s good that the new translation gives him a singable name: “McIntyre,” not “Mahoney.” I don’t know why I didn’t single out Donnie Rae Albert before for his Trinity Moses in the “Trial Scene”; he was terrific.

John Doyle’s staging doesn’t entirely work. He fills his stage with palookas and lets them fall over one another, and this especially undermines the ending. That is one of the most devastating endings in all opera, and James Conlon’s orchestra and chorus make it so here, but as Jimmy himself says, sometime earlier:

“SOMETHING’S MISSING.”

Turning Point

Mahagonny is back in town, and it’s time to take to the trees. Eighteen years ago, when the steel-edged words and music of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill were last at the L.A. Opera, they were accorded polite if stylish treatment: Kent Nagano’s musical leadership, Dr. Jonathan Miller’s brainy staging, nothing to pin you against the wall or drive needles into your shoulder blades. Things have changed, however; the difference is James Conlon, and the difference is marvelous.

The opera dates from 1930. You can click on Wikipedia and learn the state of Germany at the time, the public attitudes toward Jewish musical intellectuals and left-leaning poets, even the high-riding creators of the recent Threepenny Opera. Mahagonny was a huge hit; it played all over Germany in its first year, but its every appearance was under clouds. A great – i.e., impolite – performance of the opera, such as the one Conlon is leading at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, communicates its agitprop power. The really powerful scenes are those in which its main characters – bums, every one – proclaim the uselessness of everything a prosperous German world in 1930, or a comparable one here today, holds dear. The finale is devastating: The crowd parades with placards past the electrocuted corpse of the so-called hero Jimmy, with its procession of nihilistic messages, and with the main tunes of the opera now made grotesque by enlargement grimacing through the orchestra. Wherever the opera is properly performed, there will be cheers and boos at that moment. “It’s not really an opera, after all,” said somebody in the exit line behind me, and I wish I’d had the hour or two to explain why that person was wrong. This, in brief: It is opera, and superior of its kind, because – for one of several reasons – at that moment there is an awesome, wrenching encounter between the thudding of Brecht’s words and the hammering of Weill’s music; they are an exact match, as the words and music of Cherubino’s “Voi che sapete” formed their exact match 144 years before.

Pierre Boulez once said that if he were running a major opera house, he would burn all existing repertory and run the house on nothing but continual performances of Mahagonny. I know of worse ideas, except that after a week, Boulez’s city would be destroyed, wiped out by the hot emotional winds that howl through this extraordinary artwork. The excellence of Conlon’s conducting, which I have not heard in previous Mahagonnys here or at the Met, is his success in harnessing those hot winds, not only in the orchestra but also in much of his cast. Audra McDonald, not so much girly as a tough broad from the start, is the best Jenny ever; Anthony Dean Griffey is a splendid Jimmy; Patti LuPone (whom I haven’t had time to write love lyrics to for her Sweeney Todd on Broadway) is the Leocadia Begbick of my dreams. The director, by the way, is John Doyle, also of Sweeney.

Past Particles

Allow me some memories. When I arrived in Los Angeles in 1980 (intending to remain one year, but that’s another story), Kurt Weill was very much a living memory. The place still teemed with great old Berliners; soon they would be gone. Margot Aufricht, widow of the man who had first staged Die Dreigroschenoper, was a smiling, garrulous presence in her small house in Beverly Hills. Robert Vambéry, whose play Der Kuhhandel had become A Kingdom for a Cow, Weill’s last European production (and most abject flop), was on hand among the émigré contingent.

So was Felix Jackson. As Felix Joachimson, he had been a noted Berlin essayist and critic, and had written the text for a Kurt Weill musical, Na Und? (So What?), that had completely disappeared. The story he told was that Hans Heinsheimer, Weill’s publisher at Vienna’s Universal Editions, had advised the composer to take the manuscript and drop it off a bridge into the Danube. Maybe Weill did just that; at least Joachimson, who changed his name to Jackson, married the singing star Deanna Durbin and wrote some of her movies, loved to tell the story. I could never get him to tell me the whole scenario of Na Und?, however, just a few bits. Neither would Heinsheimer, who immigrated to New York and gossiped a blue streak about every other aspect of Weill’s life.

Anyhow, meeting all those living mementos inspired me to assemble a radio documentary, which KUSC broadcast to fair acclaim in 1982. Kim Kowalke, the renowned Weill scholar, was still teaching here at Occidental – he’s now at the University of Rochester – and he helped me with tapes of music that wasn’t otherwise available at that time. Back in Rockland County, New York, before moving out here, I had become pals with Lotte Lenya, Weill’s widow, and had miles of tape of her boilerplate reminiscences. With all that material at hand, I turned out some pretty red-hot radio, if I do say so, but not so red-hot as this new Mahagonny. These folks really know what they’re doing.

Stormin’ Norman

When the Monday Evening Concerts began in 1939 – they were called “Evenings on the Roof” back then – the first composers bore names strange and unfamiliar to local audiences: Béla Bartók, Charles Ives, Ferruccio Busoni. Audiences came, anyway. The composers on next week’s Monday Evening Concert also bear unfamiliar names: Andrew Norman, Brian Current, Ana Lara, and there’s a good chance you’ll be there, anyway. (February 19, 8 p.m., Zipper Hall)

I sat with Donald Crockett a few days ago, leafing through manuscripts of the six new works on that enterprising program. Professor of composition at USC, Crockett has been in charge of handing out encouraging words (and their opposite) to several generations of young composers; he will lead XTET, the excellent freelance ensemble, through the whichy thickets of that program’s new works. “One thing about new music these days,” says Crockett, “it looks good. Anyone with the right software can put out a professional-looking hot-off-the-press page of music and send it anywhere in the world. There’s a danger, of course: Just because it looks good (compared to the pen-and-ink scratches that used to pass for musical manuscripts in pre-computer days), that doesn’t mean that it is good.”

Why bother to compose serious music these days? Everybody has a hard-luck story about composers (conductors, violinists, critics, etc.) going broke, and yet they keep on. “Right now,” says Andrew Norman, “there are no ‘must writes’ on my horizon. I am just following my creative interest and trying to hone my voice and my technique one piece at a time.” Norman’s Gran Turismo places him as the one local composer on the Monday Evening program, although he is currently living his own gran turismo on a Prix de Rome in Italy. Three years ago, in these pages, I put down a piece from his student days as “juvenile fluff.” At USC, he obviously underwent a quick metamorphosis. “Early on,” says Crockett, “he came to my classes writing a soaring, Barberesque kind of romantic melody. Now his music is more complex than mine.”

Seventeen

What can you tell a 17-year-old who comes to your classroom with hopes of becoming a “serious classical” composer? “First,” says Steve Stucky, “I have to say that there isn’t very much I can add that that 17-year-old doesn’t already know, and that is a source of continual amazement.” Consulting composer for new music at the L.A. Philharmonic – where he has been a guiding light in the exemplary “Green Umbrella” concerts since 1988 – and professor of composition at Cornell, Stucky chose the music for the upcoming Monday Evening Concert “partly out of things I’ve been wanting to hear for a long time and keep putting off.

“Sure, I have to tell a hopeful composer that it’s a low-percentage game these days. Even so, the ways of thinking about music are so much richer, so much more exciting; the ways of distributing music are vastly greater than before.”

I ask him about stylistic boundaries. In 1939, Californians knew nothing about making it in the New York music scene unless they moved there. There was a stylistic barrier between East and West Coast. Is there, still?

“No; it’s just too easy to move around. There’s nothing inherently ‘Californian’ about Andrew’s piece except that he composed it here and that I happen to love it. On this program, we have Ana Lara from Mexico; the Long Beach Symphony has played her music. And you’ll also love Brian Current’s piece from Canada. It’s as if Elliott Carter wrote only arpeggios.”

Surf and Turf

There isn’t any music by Matt McBane on this upcoming program, but he’s out of the same USC academic swirl that spun forth Andrew Norman, and his life since graduation is a pretty good paradigm for making it as a serious musician these days.

“Getting out of school at age 22, I decided if I wanted something to happen, I had to make it happen. In 2003, I began talking with the Calder Quartet and with the city of Carlsbad – my and Calder member Ben Jacobson’s hometown – and came up with the idea for a Carlsbad Music Festival. Starting a festival with no prior arts-administration experience has been an incredibly steep learning curve, but I am very happy with where the festival is now. Last year, the Calders performed the winner of our first Young Composers Competition; the New York-based NOW Ensemble performed an entire program of music by young composers, and a large ensemble concert featured many of the best young musicians in L.A.: all these musicians together in the same place, sharing ideas and hearing each other’s work. Our next Carlsbad Festival will be in September 2007, with So Percussion, Real Quiet and the Calder Quartet.”

Paradoxically, in the midst of this California impact, Matt decided to move to New York. “My choice was based on a number of reasons, the biggest of which was simply the desire to live somewhere other than SoCal while I’m still young. I wanted to start an ensemble/band, and so I did. Tentatively, it’s called Abstraction; we had our first show in December, and we play only original music – by me, that is.

“Beyond that is the feeling, which many of my musician friends unfortunately share, that the Los Angeles musical establishment is still reluctant to endorse local composers, most of all the composers who haven’t yet established themselves elsewhere, and that there are more opportunities in New York for emerging composers – through commissions, competitions, grants, performance opportunities, etc. All that being said, I love L.A., am keeping my musical life there as active as I can, and plan on moving back in a couple of years. Also, I could never stay in New York for too long; it is just too damn cold here to surf most of the year.”

Bananas

At the sound of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s singing, strong men fell weak, nightingales blushed with envy, sunsets went pale. The pleasures she purveyed were guilty as hell, but how she could dish them out! We all had our favorite lines of her music, and they delivered sweet dreams: a defiance from a Johann Strauss operetta, a sad resignation from the other Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, a phrase from a Schubert song no matter how twisted out of context. Fond memory, cloaked in the pure silver of a Schwarzkopf recall, was enough to stop all clocks. “Sei nicht bös . . . ,” I will write (or simply breathe), and a teardrop will fall upon my keyboard . . . or almost.

“Sei nicht bös” – the traffic-stopping moment from Karl Zeller’s Der Obersteiger – isn’t even included in EMI’s new five-disc, reduced-price collection, but I’m sure that every well-equipped household already has its copy of a Schwarzkopf Sings Operetta disc in every room. The new collection has its own charms, and its curiosities as well. The first disc is worth the price of the whole set: a collection of Hugo Wolf songs that has been out of print for years. And on that disc there is a tiny pearl, lasting little more than a minute, that is worth the price of the entire disc: “Morgentau,” a perfect song you will play and replay and replay, and then go bananas over this wonderful young singer from back in 1954, who hasn’t yet learned how to flirt and fuss and turn into the Elisabeth Schwarzkopf that she would become, to the detriment of musical integrity, 20 years later.

This new collection seems made up of a fair number of barrel-scrapings: remastered recordings, outtakes from rehearsals, and worthy recordings retrieved from the dustbin. Almost everything is in mono. Some of the material doesn’t deserve the light of day: the 31-year-old soubrette chirping her way through a Strauss waltz; Wagner’s “Träume,” breathy and overphrased. A set of perfunctory songs by Walter Gieseking, with the eminent pianist at the keyboard, is hardly redeemed by his presence. But there are also treasures worth rediscovery: the Wolf disc, or a rehearsal sequence of Bach, with Schwarzkopf in harmony with the fabulous Kathleen Ferrier. Now and then, however, you can be beguiled by the bright clarity of the rising Schwarzkopf – not all that young, at 40 and 45, but clear of voice and strong of phrase and sometimes more the responsible, serious artist than she would occasionally later become. There is evidence, too, of ground she would never cover, for all those silvery tones. Listen, on disc No. 5, to her making her tortuous way through Bach’s Cantata No. 199 (“Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut”), pretty much note by note, phrase by phrase; listen then to the artistry, the comprehension of the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s performance of the same music (on a Nonesuch disc issued two years ago).

Love for Love

Hunt Lieberson’s surpassing art has blessed this region lavishly in person, in opera, choral works and solo recital, but nothing so profound, so disturbing (in the best sense) as the set of orchestral songs to texts by Pablo Neruda that she sang here in May 2005. The music was by her husband, Peter Lieberson, who conducted the Philharmonic; the poems are Neruda’s own meditations on love. “My love,” sings the lover at the end, “if I die and you don’t, let us not give grief . . . We might not have found one another in time.” Only 14 months later, the wondrous singer herself was dead.

Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs stands as one of the romantic miracles of our time. The marvel extends to Lieberson himself, whose music on this occasion breathes a renewed sense of romantic communication, reborn from anything of his I know. The blending haunts us all – husband and wife, poetry and music, a oneness both ecstatic and desperate. Shaken as we are by the intensity of her recordings – the Bach cantatas, the Handel arias, even some of the earlier Lieberson songs – we also hear a quality that goes beyond the music: a reaching, a touching. The Nonesuch recording, done live with the Boston Symphony conducted by James Levine, is beautiful and moving; if it doesn’t quite touch my memory of that May night at Disney Hall, with Lorraine standing engulfed by the orchestra and Peter’s baton the embodiment of a love beyond expression, probably nothing can.

Refreshment

The rains came on Saturday night, and so did Noah’s Flood, both welcome. Benjamin Britten’s setting of the 16th-century miracle play, not quite an opera but more fun than most, was most magically dealt with under Los Angeles Opera auspices, as the latest in the admirable outreach program designed to involve other community agencies in widespread music making. Already that has meant more new activity – newly composed school opera and revivals of bygone works like this delirious Britten masterwork – than one pair of ears or legs can keep up with. The L.A. Opera’s new music director, James Conlon, has been the firebrand in much of this, with his restoration last season of music created under Nazi captivity, his announcement of further exploration of this extraordinary repertory and the impression he generates over all that the “out” in his “outreach” has no end.

Conlon was in charge of the Britten as well, masterminding the crowd – something close to 4,000, crammed into the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels – in a rehearsal of the sing-along hymns and leading the 40-minute production in similar high spirits. Jason Stearns was the Noah; Jamieson K. Price, the Voice of God; Phyllis Pancella, Mrs. Noah decked out with a gift for bitchcraft that the framers of the original Book of Genesis had somehow overlooked. Hamilton High School’s Academy of Music supplied the mostly percussion orchestra (with a few L.A. Opera ringers); the children and adults, under Eli Villanueva’s direction, were from St. John Eudes Church, every one a scene-stealer, every one entitled.

Minimally Elderly

How the decades fly past! Steve Reich turns 70, with Phil Glass in hot pursuit; John Adams glides into 60 with nary a wrinkle. Reich’s new choral work resounds at next Sunday’s Master Chorale concert; Adams’ classics retains their bloom at a couple of Philharmonic events; the mail, as usual, delivers a new CD from Glass. Whatever your personal take on their music, elder-statesmanhood has fallen easily on all three.

The memories that remain from last year’s “Minimalist Jukebox” at the Philharmonic celebrate the longevity of the creative urge: something driving, unshakable. It’s an energy built into this music; it fueled the audience rebellions when I first heard Adams’ Grand Pianola and Reich’s Four Organs in New York in the 1980s. It echoes in the pounding on my ribs that still awakens me some nights, and in the chords that hammer the Harmonielehre into life. It stoked the shared delight eight years ago, when Esa-Pekka Salonen and our (his) Philharmonic gave Adams’ Naïve and Sentimental Music its first hearing, and that delight returned when those performers brought that music to Disney Hall this past weekend – where, of course, the piece truly belongs. This time the fantasy of Adams at work on the score, driven by poetic visions from the writings of Schiller, was further realized in the achievement of the acoustic ideal for which this lavish orchestral creation was actually composed.

Schiller’s essay (“On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’) proposes a contrast of poetic attitudes; Adams, already skilled – as in Nixon in China – in the musical presentation of dichotomies, goes on from there. As from the clash of flint against steel, the conflagration grows; the conflict in the work’s final pages is terrifying. In his own eloquent notes Adams writes of the work as a quest for a balance, perhaps unreachable at a time when the writing of grandiose orchestral music has faded from the landscape. This, he admits, might be “a deeply sentimental act.” It could also be a naive act, “because speaking through the medium of the orchestra has always been a natural and spontaneous gesture for me . . .” True enough; what justifies the existence of a 50-minute work for huge symphony orchestra (plus a gathering of exotic percussion and a sampler or two) is the mastery, the insouciant ease, of the work itself.

Naïve and Sentimental – last heard here at its premiere in the Chandler Pavilion in 1999 and therefore not properly heard until now – is the bulwark of this week’s Adams celebrations. From the congenial throb of its opening to the crashing, intimidating barrier against daylight that it throws up 50 minutes later, the music constantly astonishes. Its orchestral colors are dense and ravishing. Peer around its edges at your peril. Its title is elusive; there is nothing naive here. Rather it is the menace of coiled serpents, eternally fascinating, a challenge and a tribute to a superlative orchestra and its conductor, from a composer who knows what they can do and delights in his power to engage their best.

Beethoven’s Second Symphony shared the program. Two centuries, plus or minus, separate the works, yet there were challenges of a sort. Here too was a brash innovator trying things out, using the woodwinds in particular to fill the orchestral landscape with new sounds, new relationships. Sir Donald Tovey, my favorite writer about early classical music, wrote about the “great bassoon joke,” and the Beethoven Second is full of them, odd little veerings into the middle of next week, heralded by a chuckle from the bassoons and landing somewhere delightful, somewhere totally unexpected. Salonen’s way with these early, even-numbered Beethoven symphonies – this, and No. 4 as well – is always admirably energetic and richly humorous, and so it was this time.

Time’s End

Writing about Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is no easy matter. The symbolism in Messiaen’s apocalyptic visions is so intensely personal that you accept it fully or dismiss it as a fanatic’s ravings. If the latter, you must then deal with the music itself, its solo lines and its deeply poignant conversations of a melodic and harmonic beauty so profound that they sometimes hurt the ear. Desperately seeking somebody’s writing to crib from to fill my report on last week’s performance by Philharmonic chamber musicians, I found almost nothing on my otherwise well-stocked bookshelves. It’s as though my fellow critics share my fear of writing about this intensely beautiful, aching music.

This cannot be. Someone must write about the power of this music on purely musical grounds: the rich, flowing melody of the cello as, with piano, it extols the Eternity of Jesus in its simple, folklike tune. Someone must smile along as all instruments join in a kind of rustic jiggety-jog. Someone, most of all, must recoil at the blinding energy of the clarinet solos – wondrously played on this occasion by Lorin Levee – which burn into the imagination as if applying the Stigmata. (Is there any other music in the world more purely, upliftingly painful – to the ear, to the soul?)

A most distinguished concert, this – with the Messaien preceded, as was proper, by the Quartet of Claude Debussy. Two weeks ago I had deplored the tendency of Chamber Music Society audiences to applaud between movements, in this most fragile repertoire. This night, violinist Mitch Newman made a preconcert speech gently slapping the audience on its collective wrist. It worked.

Tree on the Move

The splendid Jacaranda Concerts still wait out the completion of remodeling at their Santa Monica venue; last Sunday’s concert found activities transferred to the Cypress Recital Hall at Cal State Northridge. A big and loyal crowd had found its way. Five sets of fingers were involved in the kind of varied piano program that only a true music-loving connoisseur could concoct; that has been the peculiar magic of these concerts from their beginning. The room at Northridge was pleasant enough, as school auditoriums go. (CSUN soon breaks ground for a major performing arts center, to open in 2009.) But Jacaranda’s home base – Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian, with its elegant small organ and its intimate layout – is a special place, and it will be good to get back, on April 7.

The program was the usual Jacaranda assortment of varied pleasures. Any concert that includes Schubert’s F-minor Fantasy, the overpowering piano duet from his last year, which moves from plaintive outcry to its final fugue that ties you in knots, needs nothing more. Hearing this work as an undergrad had caused me to change my major from pre-med to music. Sixty years later, the playing of Gloria Cheng and Robert Edward Thies confirmed the soundness of my decision. Eduardo Delgado’s Piazzolla and Ginastera, Scott Dunn’s Copland and Ives and some Liszt transformed into high-caloric goo by Steven Vanhauwaert added to the afternoon’s absurdities and its high delights.

Times Change

Get this: “New music has never been an integral part of the winter-season diet of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. On those rare occasions when our orchestra ventures an acknowledgement of the contemporary composer, the subscription audiences respond with stoic endurance at best, rude disdain at worst . . . The Philharmonic has never demonstrated a thorough, ongoing commitment to music of the relatively recent 20th Century. Instead, it has made sporadic, dutiful gestures . . . Our orchestra has at best created a ghetto for any art that tries to look forward rather than backward.”

I came across these words while poking around in old L.A. Times files for something to help celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Philharmonic’s Contemporary Music Ensemble, the venture that, five years later, renamed itself less scrutably as “The Green Umbrella.” The ——–
AUTHOR of those wishful words, dating from October 5, 1981, was the Times‘ then music critic Martin Bernheimer, whose mission among us seemed largely devoted to stamping out the notion of music as a matter for serious cultural advancement. The shards of his clouded crystal ball are all around us: Berio and Grisey at the reborn Monday Evening Concerts, the stage works of Pierre Audi and Robert Wilson at the L.A. Opera, this past week’s “Green Umbrella” concert at Disney, the one before that, and all the way back to their founding, under the scornful nose of Bernheimer, a quarter-century ago.

These concerts began small-scale, at the Japan America Theater in Little Tokyo, where one main advantage was the access to good, cheap food. A later move to Zipper Hall cost us that. The move to Disney seemed even more foolhardy: so many seats to fill, at too-high prices, once the Disney glamour wore off. Four seasons later, the too-high prices remain, but the seats are still filled – not to capacity, but still impressively for adventurous, new-music fare. Visiting concert managers and composers confess to astonishment at the size and response of the “Green Umbrella” audiences; what was this about “rude disdain”?

Take last week’s concert. The program had to be cobbled together quickly after Dawn Upshaw’s illness, and it was a beaut: music from old Los Angeles friends and new, cheered by not a sellout but certainly (for a concert of new music) an amazing-sized audience. It began with the Chain I by Witold Lutoslawski, an old friend; he had taught Steven Stucky, who has curated the Philharmonic’s new-music activities for years, and was himself on the program. The two made a splendid mix: Stucky leaning toward the conservative, Lutoslawski with a lovely thread of whimsy. Both were represented by splendid, small-scale works, and it was Stucky’s melting, loving string quartet Nell’ombra Nella Luce (repeated from a previous Chamber Music Society concert) that most immediately won hearts. The teacher-pupil relationship persisted with music by Franco Donatoni – Hot (piccolo sax and ensemble in high hysteria) – and his star disciple, Esa-Pekka Salonen, whose brand-new Catch and Release ended the evening in comparable high spirits. For the latter work – three movements, intensely motivated but somewhat given to fly off the handle – Salonen had declined to provide a program note. I would not be surprised if the version we heard, rushed into performance to fill the programming gap, was not quite the last word.

Low Downes

The fulminations of Bernheimer were as the mewlings of pussycats compared to the verbal barricades raised by the formidable Olin Downes – critic first at the Boston Post, later entrenched at The New York Times. His hegemony at both papers coincided more or less exactly with the rise in fame (or, as Downes would have it, in notoriety) of the music of Gustav Mahler. By 1918, still in Boston, he had propounded two principles that would govern his life: that worldwide damnation lay in the music of Gustav Mahler and that only Jan Sibelius held the keys to salvation. His writing style suggested a collaboration, with the other half of the team none other than the Lord Almighty. “We believe the music itself will be shelved,” he – oops, they – wrote in 1918, at the Boston premiere of Mahler’s Second Symphony, “long before the memory of the man and his services to his art will be forgotten.” And at another event, he simply took his leave from the concert hall in midperformance, and then simply wrote, “We do not like the Mahler Seventh Symphony.” On that occasion, the great Arnold Schoenberg, horrified at such effrontery, took it upon himself to scold the errant Mr. Downes. They argued back and forth for several weeks; the correspondence, published in Schoenberg’s Collected Letters, looms large in the annals of criticism.

What they might have missed just last week! I too, in my days of indiscretion, have had my reservations about certain expanses of the overstuffed Mahler. Friday night’s performance of the Seventh Symphony was, in a word, transforming: the Philharmonic under Salonen the source of an audible substance not yet heard, in a range of color not yet seen. Gatherings of instruments whispering, now under light strokes, now under exultant percussion . . . somebody stop me! By a great orchestra, in a great hall, under a great conductor, this was one of the great performances.

High Renaissance

All things to all people: The night before, there was Sting, not with memories of Police or Stewart Copeland (until the last number) but with Disney absolutely filled with a happy crowd that seemed to know why they were there. (For myself, I wasn’t so sure, at first.) The music at hand was by John Dowland, the Renaissance fabricator of exquisite, sad songs and slow, haunting lute tunes. (He made much of the pun on his name: dolens: “grieving.”) Between songs, Sting read lines from letters, or perhaps diary entries, outlining the sad journey of Dowland’s life, which was, indeed, a dolorous concoction compounded of rejections by potential employers and lovers. Edin Karamazov, a lutenist and guitarist who has performed with Paul Hillier and Jordi Savall, played on both instruments, somewhat percussively to my taste. Sting also played his own collection of lutes and guitars. A men’s octet, the Concord Ensemble, sang along on a few numbers, not nearly enough.

The beauty of Dowland’s songs justifies their appearance on any kind of respectable program, which this actually was. The earthiness of Sting’s delivery had its own appeal, so long as you didn’t think about Alfred Deller or the Hilliards. The songs included one by the Renaissance’s Robert Johnson and another by the one from our own time, which was cute.