So I've Heard

Being There

My relationship with Bela Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra has been historic and loving. I attended the world premiere, as a second-balcony usher in Boston’s Symphony Hall, December 1, 1944. Backstage after the performance, on my way to change out of uniform, I met Bartók and shook his hand. The look in that man’s eyes, already ravaged by the leukemia that would take his life nine months later, remains with me always. That memory, in fact, is the core of my regard for that work as one of the miracles of its time: the extraordinary contrast between the devastation I read in those eyes that night and the magnificent strength, the affirmation – even the rich, delicious humor – of that score. The paradox of this robust, youthful music from the pen of an elderly invalid (working, in fact, in his hospital bed) goes to explain the further marvel of last week’s wondrous performance at Disney Hall, with the latest phenomenon on the horizon – a real one, for a change – leading our Philharmonic through every nuance of this marvelous score, its ancient wisdom and its contemporary, youthful exuberance.

His name, which surely must come as no surprise by now as the PR machines have been grinding away, is Gustavo Dudamel; he is 26; he hails from Venezuela, where he has been a product of that country’s extraordinarily enlightened musical-education program; and he has already had musicians and audiences throughout Europe singing and orchestrating his praises. His North American debut was at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005, with Tchaikovsky and Revueltas; last week’s program contained, besides the Bartók, Kodály’s Galanta Dances and the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto. Questions remain, therefore, about his more, let’s say, “classical” leanings. They can be answered in part by a new Beethoven CD on Deutsche Grammophon (solid, no serious errors, no reason to trade in your Carlos Kleiber recordings) and by a Don Giovanni at La Scala that was generally regarded as too much too soon.

Last week’s concert may have left a few minor questions unanswered, but handled the rest of them loud and clear; not merely the latest package to tumble off the prodigy assembly line, young Gustavo is an authentic talent. He knows what he’s doing, is greatly gifted in conveying that knowledge to the people around him and, better yet, seems uncommonly able to make those people work with him. Details in the Bartók that I have sometimes taken for granted – the strings’ “buzzing” in the Intermezzo interrotto – seemed freshly profiled. Something comes across, a sense of the joy of music making. At the end of each piece, as the crowd goes bonkers out front, young Gustavo strolls through the orchestra, shaking hands all the way through the ranks. Maybe it’s only an act, but the conviviality it creates was something you could feel. No, it didn’t make the Rach 3 any less the overstuffed bundle of trash than the work truly is; not even the excellent Yefim Bronfman could work that level of miracle.

Comparisons between Dudamel and Britain’s Simon Rattle have been frequently voiced, and Rattle has, indeed, been eloquent in praise of this remarkable newcomer. It’s not just the mop of curly hair, however; if you watch early Rattle DVDs – the “Leaving Home” series on ArtHaus, for example – you see that same eagerness to put things across, that obsession almost to reach into the orchestra and pull things out into the light, that made everything in last week’s concert, wherever you sat in Disney Hall, more vivid, more thrilling. We need conductors like that; now we have one more.

Clap Trap

With five movements in the Bartók concerto, extroverted music in an enthralling performance, you might have expected some amount of renegade applause between movements, but there was none, the ultimate homage to the young maestro and his worthy impulses. The night before, there had been chamber music in that hall: Haydn and Schubert performed by Philharmonic members, classy, subtle stuff for an audience, you would think, aware that applause between movements in chamber music is never – repeat, never – done. (There’s even a full page of Roz Chast cartoons in the program book about concert etiquette, including applause between movements, maybe a little too cute to be taken as seriously as it deserves.) Still, there was applause – hearty applause – after each and every movement, and no attempt by players to wince, scowl or otherwise register displeasure at the practice. Go figure.

I am of several minds on the matter of interstitial applause in the concert hall. I would gladly applaud movements two and four of the Bartók concerto, just on the off chance that the composer’s spirit might be on hand to appreciate my appreciation of those sections’ remarkable cleverness. But the listener who violates the silence that fulfills the spirit following a hearing of the slow movement of Schubert’s B-flat Trio, played as it was last week by Bronfman, Bing Wang and Ben Hong, simply cannot have been welcoming that music into his or her bloodstream. For such an attack of anemia at its most pernicious, perhaps a compulsory pair of boxing gloves, handed out by ushers to each auditor errant, might do the trick.

Concerted Efforts

Two segments remain (February 17-18, March 17-18) of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s two-year sweep through the piano concertos of Mozart: Saturdays at Glendale’s Alex Theatre, Sundays at UCLA’s Royce Hall. The turnouts have been close to capacity; it’s not just my imagination that I’ve absorbed these concerts as a kind of communion, a closeness in which Mozart, Jeffrey Kahane at the piano, and his marvelous orchestra have been participants on an equal level, all of us with something important and wonderful to say, to hear and to believe in.

That’s Mozart, and I say this not to explain, just to marvel. At the concert in mid-December, there were three concertos: two from 1784 composed only weeks apart, one from two years later. The first (K. 451, referring to Ritter von Köchel’s chronological listing) is a jovial, rawboned work full of tricks – the piano bursting in too soon, that sort of thing. The second, K. 456, is colored with darker moods, with a slow movement, a set of melancholy variations, that suddenly jolts you by a turn from minor to major with strange and marvelous changes of light. Ending that program was K. 503, music from more troubled times, two years later. Don Giovanni and the G-minor String Quintet were now on Mozart’s worktable, and the piano concerto had become for him a more imposing kind of musical drama, its opening phrases in this case like blocks of granite colliding. (It had also begun to lose Mozart the audience that the more frivolous earlier concertos had earned.) In this work, too, there are later kinds of jolt: a tantalizing alternation between major and minor, a sudden, sublime theme out of nowhere midway in the finale.

Concerto Conversations (Harvard University Press) is Joseph Kerman’s book on the way the inner life of a piece of music stems from the confrontation of the parts within that music, with the concerto through the ages as the paradigm for that kind of wordless drama. My Berkeley classroom memories teem with Kerman’s passion for this aspect of the musical language; I’ve asserted my own kindred spirit by dedicating my latest book to him. Some pages in his own book express his particular delight in those magical Mozart moments when the solo piano makes its first appearance in a concerto after the orchestra has made some kind of opening statement: the hilarious arabesque leading to a trill at the start of the so-called “Elvira Madigan” Concerto (K. 467); the shy testing-the-waters, one toe at a time, at the start of K. 503. Concertos model human relationships, Kerman claims, and even as he moves on from Mozart into music you wouldn’t be found dead listening to – not the first of Saint-Saëns’ two cello concertos but the second, of all dead-as-doornail repertory! – he succeeds in finding in these works a dogged adherence to the dramatic principles that establish the concerto as the most subtle (because wordless) of musical forms. All told, Kerman’s book forms quite a thrilling compendium on matters of musical rhetoric, and of deviations from norms made acceptable only by their being set to music. (Anna Russell: “You can get away with anything, so long as you sing it.”)

The Major and the Minor

I write here rather often about goose bumps, about moments in music that activate the tear ducts or the shiver glands or whatever those reactive mechanisms are called – actually, something in the brain called the “left insula,” if anyone cares – and whatever they are, I bear them with pride. Something about the Mozart piano concerto is particularly dangerous ground for the care and feeding of the goose bump, for reasons not difficult to fathom. A pianist in proper tune with this music – Jeffrey Kahane, Emanuel Ax, Mitsuko Uchida – succeeds after very few notes in converting that great, clumsy music box into an instrument of pure song.

It takes very few fingers. The passages in Mozart’s piano concertos, in fact, that most readily reduce the listener’s spirit to a state comparable to a box of molten Godiva are usually nothing more than one-finger tunes: the slow movements of the aforementioned K. 467 (reduced to the status of slush, alas, by the background-music guys), K. 488 and K. 595. More readily than any of these, it is the slow movement of K. 482 that enslaves me utterly on every hearing. It turned up on Kahane’s final program last season. Emanuel Ax performed it with the Philharmonic this past November with Alexander Mickelthwate conducting. It is one of the most richly scored of all the Mozart concertos, with almost a full complement of winds, plus timpani. The work is in E flat, which for a 1786 orchestra means a full workout for clarinets and horns; their tuning makes them easier to play in flat keys.

The slow movement begins with a rather dour minor tune, with stops and starts and a stark harmonic palette. Over a series of slow variations, these sparse harmonies become gradually filled in, and one pretty variant – with a solo flute – seems to herald a warming trend. Even so, for a work whose first movement had been fairly jolly, and with horns and clarinets on hand to warm up the atmosphere, this still seems rather stern stuff until . . .

The minor tune takes on a new shape, a closing cadence of deep, tragic sentiment, breath-stopping in its simple beauty. And at its end, for just a few seconds, a cloud across the sunset, it quietly slips from minor to a sunburst of momentary major in what we call a deceptive cadence. The sky clears, the movement comes to an end; the silence allows us to breathe, to wonder, “What hit me?” Then the music starts again: the finale, with a tune that might almost pass for “The Farmer in the Dell.” That, as I was saying, is Mozart.

Paradoxes

The collapse of Tower Records was, as much as anything, a failure of relevance. The new generation, which in the past would have become the next record-buying public and the next, now download the infinite riches of the market onto their iPods. The hi-fi crowd of my youth, with their 6L6s in push-pull and their floor-to-ceiling Tannoys and Klipschorns, now have given way to something you wear in your shirt pocket. The paradox is that the few remaining quality classical-record producers – Harmonia Mundi with their Gloryland, Anonymous 4 singing old-timey American gospel songs in wrenching harmonies with guitar and fiddle; Nonesuch with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s heartbreaking singing of her husband Peter’s Neruda Songs; major works by Osvaldo Golijov on several labels – are exactly what I would have greeted in the past as ongoing evidence of the continued health of the record industry.

The Tower collapse came just in time to end the supply of discs to the Disney Hall gift shop – which had drawn its stock of recordings from the chain – and, thus, to temporarily deny concertgoers’ access to Salonen and the Philharmonic’s new disc on DG. This was its first recording made in the hall (noise grandissimo, leading off, as you might guess, with The Rite of Spring) and it merited a champagne sendoff, but without any CDs to hand out and/or sell, there wasn’t much point. But don’t forget it: If you want to know why The New York Times assessed the emergence of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Philharmonic and the Los Angeles music scene in general as a “Continental Shift,” you might start with this disc.

The year saw the usual punctuations, struggles in the underbrush to fulfill earlier rumors and generate a new crop. From the Philadelphia Orchestra, a hard-luck ensemble ever since the opening of its new, afflicted Kimmel Center (replacing its ancient, afflicted Academy of Music), came word that Christoph Eschenbach would resign as music director after only three seasons. The report was garlanded with the usual set of news items, if more vehement than usual: Eschenbach at odds with the orchestra, orchestra members at odds with him, Philadelphia at odds with his scheduling of new music, with the cut of his jib on the podium, with the city’s cultural stature as the shadow of New York.

In the latter city, too, the shadows danced restlessly. The New York Philharmonic’s Lorin Maazel, at 76 not yet retired but no spring chicken, made it known to board members that Daniel Barenboim, only a dozen years younger, would be his choice as successor – a choice that Barenboim himself, so far, has tossed aside. More than that, rumors fly thick and fast that Zarin Mehta, the New York Philharmonic’s managing director, has his own choice, the Venezuelan whiz Gustavo Dudamel, who has been burning his way across Europe to the adoration of audiences and players alike. Young Gustavo, two weeks short of 26, has already been here once, at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005 when he did, indeed, provide a one-man fireworks display. He returns for an indoor engagement, starting January 4. Twenty-six? Didn’t our own Philharmonic have a music director that age once?

Prodigies, hmmm . . . While wishing young Gustavo Dudamel all the good fortune in the world, I pause to wish him an equal measure of lasting talent. This has been a year of prodigies going fizzle or, at least, a year when I’ve really begun to have my fill of overpampered one-time whiz-bang soloists who, as the years press down and the wrinkles come, attempt to ride the prodigy wagon one time too many and come ever closer to falling off. Joshua Bell hit me that way, and the matchup between the fresh-faced schoolboy of his latest set of publicity shots and the tired routinier wandering through the Brahms Violin Concerto was most disheartening. A few weeks later came Sarah Chang, equally adrift in the Bruch Violin Concerto. Both, as kids, had been the exciting, youthful stars of their generation; perhaps, along the way, they simply neglected to learn the musical side of their music-making. Sad.

The Year

Wherever you looked – for a time, anyhow – it seemed that George Tsypin had you trapped. First there was Grendel at the opera. Elliot Goldenthal’s garish, ponderous score to John Gardiner’s wonderful retelling of the Beowulf legend reduced the piece to Saturday cartoon; Julie Taymor’s puppetry and other stage tricks have been around before. Tsypin’s humongous wall, once they got it to work, was . . . well, a humongous wall. Tony Tommasini of The New York Times aptly reduced the novelty of it all; the Met, he suggested, must have a dozen of these in its warehouse. Came October, and Tsypin was back with the home crew: his reimagining of Wagner’s Ring – all of it, headless giants, mudbaths, schmoolike dwarfs, huge, hulking structures, everything you’d want to see in a Ring except perhaps magic fire, galloping Valkyries, an all-purpose sword and the other crucial elements on which Wagner’s plot actually turns. Valery Gergiev imposed what sounded like an eloquent vision of Wagner’s score, but onto an orchestra rendered inept by an overcrowded Orange County venue, all in the name of inaugurating a new concert hall where the performance didn’t even take place. Oh yes, and there is a gorgeous Tsypin Ring on DVD from the Netherlands Opera, directed by Pierre Audi with the same imaginative use of space and minimal props as in Audi’s Coronation of Poppea that just ended its run at the L.A. Opera.

That was the event that lingers longest – that, and the Philharmonic’s “Minimalist Jukebox”; Golijov’s Ainadamar at Ojai; every note from the pen, the fingers and the baton of Thomas Adès during his two “residencies”; the “marathon” – eight hours culled from the past century, splendidly performed all by local musicians to inaugurate the new; “Jacaranda” concert season; Falla’s Master Peter’s Puppet Show led by Salonen to start the new Philharmonic season; his Mahler Third the next night; Alan Gilbert conducting the Mahler Ninth and the audience’s absolute silence that greeted it; Lucy Schaufer’s Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro and – surprise! – Nikolaj Znaider’s reading of the Sibelius Violin Concerto, music I usually abominate but which came gloriously to life on this occasion. That’s why I keep going to concerts; you just never know.

Words’ Worth

“Music is never pure,” wrote Luciano Berio of his Circles, “it is attitude; it is theater.” Berio’s great vocal adventure ended the 1961-62 season of Monday Evening Concerts, to a capacity crowd. It began the 2006-07 season last week, again with a turn-away box office. Much has happened in between; we’ll get to that.

Berio’s late, great works all mirrored his fierce fascination with the interaction of words and sound. Before Circles, there had been a piece dissecting passages from Joyce’s Ulysses through electronic manipulation of sounds and syllables. Circles, even trickier, took poetry of e.e. cummings (which was already involved with fragmenting words and phrases) and broke them up even further so that the poet’s distinctive orthography found its mirror in its musical setting. The Berio legacy is a phenomenal repertory of music-plus-language, spilling over into opera, large-scale choral music, and glorious theatrical works, of which Circles is one.

That work was inspired by, and therefore created for, Berio’s wife at the time, the late, great actress/singer/indefinable creative spirit Cathy Berberian. Last March, when the Philharmonic’s “Minimalist Jukebox” came up with an extraordinary new actress/singer/indefinable creative spirit named Cristina Zavalloni, the whispers started to rise: Is there a new Circles on the horizon? The whispers reached the committee who were struggling to rekindle the Monday Evening Concerts, after that valuable enterprise had been bounced (for no good reason, and several bad) by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the long story was made short last week at REDCAT. Zavalloni was back, as great as we knew she would be; she followed her spellbinding performance of Circles with another of Berberian’s numbers, a monologue made up of comic-strip punch lines. Cristina Berio, daughter of Berberian, looked pleased. Imagine, sitting still while someone just about half your age does your own mom onstage.

It was quite an evening, in fact, a benefit honoring the late Dorrance Stalvey, who had planned and managed the series for its last 34 years, literally single-handed, and made it one of the most adventurous concert programs anywhere in the country – in variety and in quality of performers. This first program bore this out: an established contemporary masterpiece, a respectable piece of new-music academe (by Stalvey himself) and a 40-minute work of genuine challenge by a composer, the late Gérard Grisey, out of the European mainstream, whose music might have lingered long on the doorstep if small organizations like MEC were not at hand to usher it in.

Three more Monday Evenings are in the works for this season, all at Zipper Concert Hall (across from Disney). The next, on February 19, will focus on young American composers.

Properly Magnified

Near the end of his Magnificat – music that sent a capacity Disney crowd homeward one night last week practically chortling in their joyousness – old Bach pulls one of those intricacy tricks that, so often with just the slightest flick of the pen, sets him sky-high above his Baroque buddies. It’s actually a very quiet passage: two sopranos and an alto in a slow tune about how God has helped out Israel in times of trouble. Two singers’ vocal lines go up the scale; the third goes down in gentle counterpoint; the low instruments throb a simple accompaniment. But there’s one more thing: Over all this, two oboes intone yet another melody, an ancient “Magnificat” chant that Mozart would also use, 60 years later, in his Requiem. That sound, high above everything else in this quiet, soft-spoken movement, becomes like a star in a firmament. Long after the entire Magnificat is over, with its trumpeting exultations and its breathless string of tiny movements that come on like a bill of particulars on why our souls should, indeed, magnify the Lord, the exquisite craftsmanship of this one tiny passage lingers in the memory.

We all have our small pantheon of special moments; this tiny jewel in the Magnificat, set amid the splendor of the whole work, happens to be one of mine. (For your information, among its companions are a certain high D in Mozart’s G-minor Quintet, the modulation back to E major in Schubert’s C-major Quintet, and Violetta’s singing of “Ah! Dite alla giovine” in La Traviata). When listening to Bach, I am aware that different muscles are called into play than when listening to Mozart (ahhhh!) or Brahms (grrrr!). There is that extra dimension: the sense of being present at the solving of an intricate problem – an “elegant solution,” my mathematician friends like to say – and having it also come out beautiful and moving.

Proof? They’re all over the place. One is the slow movement of the first “Brandenburg” Concerto, which consists of a minor-key tune that twists upon itself in a kind of tense counterpoint. Because the tune is in a minor key, and starts on No. 5 of that scale, the progression No. 5 to No. 6 will be a wrench (G to A-flat on the piano, say). Play this off against itself, as Mr. Bach does quite on purpose, and your teeth begin to hurt. Hand it off to the lower-pitched instruments and the dissonance becomes all the more grating. Here is this churchly, correct composer stirring up the demons of dissonance, circa 1720; you could stick this stuff into a Mahler symphony and nobody would notice. Nor would the devout Wagnerite flinch at the music for the Crucifixion in the B-minor Mass; that wrenching dissonance is simply Bach himself flinching at that horrid moment, and shifting from one classical key to another as if to get the tragedy off his back.

Beauty plus process: It’s that mingling, on a level field, that breeds the particular satisfaction in the Bach experience. Canadian conductor Bernard Labadie, in his latest holiday-time visit with his wonderfully spirited, crystalline-voiced small chorus La Chapelle de Québec – 40 strong, joined to a Philharmonic contingent of like proportion – made this Bach immersion a mostly joyous experience. The Magnificat made the most glorious noise; to begin, there was sterner stuff, the motet Jesu, Meine Freude for chorus alone with supporting bass, and an alternative version of the Gloria from the B-minor Mass that I might have swapped for less familiar fare. But the night was Bach’s, and Labadie’s, and those two oboes’, and they outshone everything else.

Straight to the Kisser

The Sixth Symphony of Antonin Dvorák disarms all protest. It snuggles into your awareness with a warm-hearted, syncopated throb, eases onto your lap and delivers an irresistible wet kiss. No other music in my acquaintance, large-scale or small, comes at you quite this way, although the previous symphony in the Dvorák canon, No. 5 in F, tries the same trick and makes it work almost as well. When I was toying with the notion of a career in writing about music, I came across words about the Dvorák Sixth – it was listed as No. 1 back then, before the definitive catalog came out – by Sir Donald Tovey, and they firmed my resolve. Sir Donald wrote about the “sublimity” of this work, “that sublimity which is utterly independent of the size or range of the artist’s subject, which trails clouds of glory not only with the outlook of the child but with the solemnity of the kitten running after its tail.”

That is, indeed, the quality in Dvorák that some people often miss in writing off his best works as a kind of Brahms Lite. The child, the kitten – and the lover of beauty at any age – were part of the sublimity that filled Disney Hall last week as the Philharmonic and its inspired guest conductor Jiri Belohlavek took on the Dvorák Sixth and gave it exactly the right accent for delivering that aforementioned kiss and all the marvels that ensued. That same conductor, by the way, turns up on a two-disc Warner Classics set of both the Fifth and the Sixth, but the BBC Symphony doesn’t quite match the endearing accents he drew from our own Philharmonic. Here those accents – the little extra light at the top of the phrase, the ever-so-slight whoosh around the glorious tune of the slow movement (eat yer heart out, Doktor Brahms!) – were so beautifully managed that you’d swear the whole orchestra had spent the week on Pilsener transfusions. Oh my, it was beautiful!

Perhaps it was this that made the ensuing music, the G-minor Concerto of Max Bruch, land with such a thud, although a team of Heifetz, Paganini and Evelyn’s Magic Violin couldn’t have breathed the spark of life into this glorified café number. I just know that Sarah Chang, for all her pirouettes and expressive face making, didn’t. Can it be that I – along with the rest of the world – am beginning to tire of aging prodigies clinging to former glory through means other than musical? The ovation on Saturday night did not carry Sarah Chang through to an encore, nor had it for Joshua Bell a few weeks ago: proof, I’d like to think, that our audiences are maturing faster than some of our performers.

Janácek and Balance

Léos Janácek’s Taras Bulba in its full scoring, organ and all, returned the evening to its proper store of brilliant, slashing orchestral colors. Marvelous, quirky, full of dark shadows – and not much to do in tone or spirit with the Yul Brynner shoot-’em-up – this, too, is music full of subtle accents, nicely comprehended by the excellent Belohlavek.

By delicious coincidence, there had been other Janácek, in quite different accents, earlier last week: piano works including the well-known and exquisite suite In the Mist and a gathering of short, utterly charming, virtually unknown character pieces, all chosen by Thomas Adès to round off his Philharmonic “residency” with a guest shot at the neighboring “Piano Spheres” series. For the intimate space of Zipper Hall, this phenomenal Brit came up with a delightful program alternatively hard-nosed and whimsical, evidence of his ability to astound an audience with the depth and breadth of his musical purview. The crowd, by the way, was the largest I’ve ever seen at a “Piano Spheres” event, further proof that this phenomenal invader from the Homeland has staked out a considerable claim here in the Colonies. Included were a couple of merely cute, lightweight pieces by Stravinsky and the Italian pedagogue Niccolo Castiglione and a brace of canons composed by Conlon Nancarrow for mechanical piano and therefore, you would think, unplayable by human hands. (Think again.) Two early piano works by Adès himself, neither more than 10 minutes’ duration but both bristling with a young composer’s eagerness to burst out into the world, provided the evening’s most substantial musical message; the temptation was to hear them, as I did, as echoes of Asyla, his great orchestral work from about the same time, which Adès had led with the Philharmonic only three nights before. Asyla invaded our complacency first at Ojai in 2000, then in 2003 as part of the Disney Hall inaugural weeks. Simon Rattle conducted both times; this was my first hearing of Asyla under another baton.

The work endures. Overpowering as the temptation may have been, at those first hearings, to overvalue the murderous hullabaloo of the one movement (of four) quite accurately labeled “Ecstasio,” further scrutiny brings the work into focus: an unruly, daring but consistent masterpiece of many moods marvelously comprehended. Its moods, and its mood changes, are deliberate and profound; they are no less valid than the wet kiss of Dvorák. It’s interesting, and not, I’m sure, accidental, that at the Philharmonic, Asyla shared the program with Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony, almost exactly a century older. There, too, an ecstatic third movement leads to a tragic ending – which, at that time, engulfed the composer as well as his music. (The podium was also shared that night: Adès to conduct his own work, Philharmonic assistant conductor Joana Carneiro to lead a tidy if noncommittal reading of the “Pathétique.”)

Both works end in darkness, Asyla with mysterious, threatening percussion off in undefined distances. “You haven’t heard the end of me,” the 26-year-old composer/prodigy seemed to be saying seven years ago. The good news is that time has proved him right.

Sex Triumphant . . .

Beyond the memories – pleasant, as far as they go – of The Coronation of Poppea with the Emperor Nero cruising his realm in a Ferrari bearing ROMA-1 license plates, and far beyond the abject journalistic misrepresentation of the pristine work in last week’s hometown press, two aspects of this extraordinary artwork demand our immediate consideration. One is the opera itself, dated 1643 in Venetian performance annals, surviving in manuscripts that show the possible work of hands other than those of Claudio Monteverdi (who bears the principal attribution), hands most likely those of students or close associates of the master much imbued with his own musical and dramatic insight. The second is the awareness that, fun and frolic as lively updatings like the Long Beach Opera escapades in the 1980s may have provided (and they did put the company on the map), the alternative – a reproduction of exactly what was seen and heard on the stages of Venice in 1643 – would surely drive a 2006 audience from the hall, myself in the lead. Somewhere in the middle, the production currently at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion accomplishes with glowing imagination to a 2006 audience what that premiere performance might have done in its time, but does so to eyes, ears and sensibilities honed by 363 years of intervening culture. It creates musical drama convincing, overwhelming, magical, four hours that whiz past like last week’s high winds.

This production of this rare, ancient and hugely powerful musical drama is an act of some bravery on the part of our local company. (The Metropolitan Opera, you will be interested to learn, has produced Monteverdi exactly once in its 120-year history: a cut-down, unstaged L’Orfeo in 1912.) The staging is from the Netherlands Opera, which sent us the Monteverdi Return of Ulysses in 1997. Both are works born from the fabulous imagination of Pierre Audi, with his extraordinary sense of the geometry of stage space and his use of fire as a spoken language amazingly, contrapuntally consistent with the sung language.

That sung language in the current cast is astonishing. Far removed though it be from Baroque ideals of crescendo, vibrato and attacca, it forms its own dramatic world: the intensity of Susan Graham’s creamy, importuning Poppea, her tiger’s claws cloaked in deepest velvet; the sheer nastiness of tenor Kurt Streit’s Nero (the most drastic “inauthenticity”; he is written as a castrato); the Wagnerian basso of the Seneca, the well-named Reinhard Hagen. An excellent, authentic touch: the nurse, Arnalta, sung falsetto as is proper by Christopher Gillett with costume to match; the comic drag nurse was to become one of Baroque opera’s most irritating clichés.

Harry Bicket’s small orchestra – long-necked theorbos (delightful to watch, like feeding ostriches), strings, harpsichord and an enchanting portative organ, a “carpet of starlight” I heard someone say, perhaps me – is nicely placed in a small recess downstage. “Stage” itself, as with Ulysses, consists mostly of empty spaces defined by single elements: a slanted pole, a ring, a sphere. It seems to bestride visually what the musical realization accomplishes for the ear: an artistic language of any and all times. You get the sense of floating in time, and in space as well.

That is part of the amazement of Poppea, something I don’t think those 1643 audiences could have grasped. Now, 363 years after the fact, we have this ethereal time/space journey, an ancient object beautifully restored to the sight and the sound of its original spirit. At the same time, we are confronted with this very modern opera. For the first time in operatic history, the characters are real, with names and listings in Plutarch (the Google of its day). They make their first entrance not in militaristic rhetoric but deep in conversation about how it was for both of them in bed last night. For the first (but not last) time, Evil (not Good) rules the roost at the final curtain. Just like Tosca, you say? No, better. This is where it began.

. . . And Beauty Too

There is a fierceness in Gerald Barry’s Triumph of Beauty and Deceit that hammers words and music into a single onward surge of energy. It was not surprising that the performance under Thomas Adès, by five excellent male singers and a contingent of Philharmonic players at last week’s “Green Umbrella” concert, left Adès himself with sopping shirt. The impact of the music, virtually nonstop, could easily be shared wherever you were in that vibrant hall.

Much was made of the work’s relationship to Handel, of whose Triumph of Time and Truth Barry’s score is a kind of treacherous paraphrase. Less was made of Barry’s countryman James Joyce, and yet the tumbling, headlong language rhythms, the rough impatience of the jig-time patterns seem at times to evoke the rough throbbings of Finnegan and of the great, atmospheric early works as well. The poetry is by Meredith Oakes, whose elegant paraphrase of Shakespeare’s The Tempest afforded Adès the remarkably free libretto for his recent opera on that play. Here her language is even trickier, indulging in delusions and rhyming paradoxes that then become wonderfully answered in Barry’s garrulous, immensely ingratiating score. If word got out that the score was actually the work of musically gifted leprechauns, it would not surprise me in the least. It would also help to explain the affinity the composer of such a work as the opera Powder Her Face might harbor for someone else’s music that seeks to elevate matters of truth, beauty, decay and deceit to a high artistic level. Both works, you see, were created in the same year.

Out of Mothballs

Large-scale chamber works by Gabriel Fauré, I would have thought, might comfortably rest on one of the less accessible shelves in my musical larder, their presence acknowledged from afar. After succumbing to the absolute enchantment of one of these works, the C-minor Piano Quintet, at a recent Philharmonic Chamber Music Society concert, I rushed home to discover that yes, I did indeed own a recording of this remarkable score – along with the earlier D-minor Quintet – but that the disc, at least 15 years old and long out of print, had sat there gathering dust, never even unwrapped. Mine the shame.

There is much beguilement in Fauré: the songs, some charmers for piano, above all the Requiem, which is best heard by candlelight in a recording (there are two) conducted by Nadia Boulanger. The power in this 30-minute quintet, composed three years before the composer’s death, is a different language: an earnest, mysterious oratory, a brief and hilarious romp, a dark and somber meditation, and a final exultant resolution. At Disney, where some chamber works seem adrift in all that space, Fauré, of all people, filled the hall. Thomas Adès was the pianist; you have to assume that he hears a kindred voice in this music, however far from his own. Even more remarkable is the way the special pleading in his playing managed to motivate the rest of the ensemble, above all the very young Johnny Lee, whose violin sang most eloquently.

All told, a chamber concert nicely planned. Music by Jean Françaix began it, another French romantic, perhaps more deserving of his earned obscurity but a sweet charmer in his perky, neo-cancan fashion. Midway there was Steven Stucky’s Nell’ombra, Nella Luce, which, despite its Italian title, seemed quite French in its charming interplay of “light” and “dark” music. The music dates from 2000 and, to confound the Latin origins one step further, was first performed by the Cuarteto Latinoamericano. Against other works by Stucky that I greatly admire for their honesty and marvelous clarity, I find the Nell’ombra music of lesser substance. My memory of the concert resides, in surprise and delight, with the great work of Fauré.

Basic Bass

At the Philharmonic last weekend there was John Harbison’s not-quite-brand-new Concerto for Bass Viol (Double Bass to you) and Orchestra, and the orchestra’s own first bassist Dennis Trembly to do winning battle with its intricacies. Harbison is an old friend, although we once had more of his music – orchestral, vocal, chamber – than we’ve had lately. Dawn Upshaw sings his songs, and renders them gorgeous.

The new piece, I’m saddened to report, is of a lesser order. It is riddled with gadgetry, almost as if the composer had taken a box of “Handy Things You Can Do With a Double Bass” and scattered them through a very lazy orchestral texture. Perhaps John Harbison believes that is all you can do with a double bass, but I don’t believe that for a second, and there are too many players around, on both sides of the “serious”-“pop” divide, to make that stick. (See you at Charlie Haden’s concert tonight, December 1, at REDCAT?)

There are, indeed, all the tricks, and they are impressive. Dennis Trembly draws an expressive, long melody (properly marked “lamento”) out of his handsome instrument to start things off. Later on, there are some gorgeous, crackling displays of pizzicato. All as expected: You can’t have a bass viol on a stage and not expect a long melody here and a shower of pizzicato there. Mr. Harbison, at least, knows the territory. It’s sad that he stayed within its borders.

The Seventh Symphony of Antonin Dvorák was the evening’s great music, as it is whenever it appears. I seem to hear more and more often, to my ever-increasing satisfaction, the expressed sentiment that this is the greatest of all romantic symphonies, the one most deeply emotional, most beautifully shaped. Perhaps the continued availability of the venerable Giulini performance, one of the expressive miracles of all recordings (the two-disc set on EMI with the London Philharmonic, not the more recent Royal Philharmonic version), has helped spread the word.

More the pity, then, that the Philharmonic’s guest conductor, Carlos Kalmar, worked in so many ways to distort the power of this marvelous symphony: ignoring the specified repeats in both first and third movements, dragging down hard on expressive retards, driving the brass so brutally that you’d think you were back in the Chandler Pavilion. Maestro Kalmar’s vita boasts of mittel-europäisches blood, and his affectionate readings of some Janácek operatic excerpts at the start of the program, proved he had some. It seemed to have run out too soon.

The Big Sleep

A granddad behind a sandwich at the Music Center last Sunday was overheard bragging that he had attended 34 operas and slept through them all, and I suddenly understood why Hansel and Gretel remains in favor. Inside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that afternoon, I heard no delighted cheers – not very much, even, in the way of applause. The response from the middle-size audience was, let’s say, dutiful, especially that of the very well-behaved junior members respectfully fulfilling their elders’ notion of a proper musical upbringing.

The funny animals, Maurice Sendak-inspired, with flashing eyes and all that stuff, were supposed to represent the “14 angels” of the famous Prayer. I counted only 12, and they drew so little response that I assumed that most of the kids had the same toys at home. Director-designer Douglas Fitch created a camouflage-fabric forest that came apart and came back together and looked merely ugly. Last year I expressed the desire to bundle up Lucy Schaufer, the Cherubino in Figaro, and install her among my own art treasures. At the risk of raising eyebrows, I must confess that my desire waxes hotter after her Hansel, if only to rescue her from the authentic agony the insipidity of this opera instills. I have interviewed enough 10-year-olds (as recently as this past Thanksgiving) to know that kids today have outgrown Hansel and Gretel. They need Salome.

Powder Keg

Powder Her Face is an arrogant young man’s masterpiece, fearless and forthright. Its central character – the decrepit, decaying Duchess of Argyle, fornicating her way toward oblivion – is one in a grand line of operatic monsters from Amneris, say, to Lulu. Its creator – the formidable Brit Brat Thomas Adès, at 24 – might also be accorded a place in a grand procession of the classically omnipotent, from the fire-wielding Prometheus of ancient times to Citizen Kane and, for that matter and closer to our own time, his creator, Orson Welles. It is nine years since Powder Her Face, and Tom Adès rides ever higher.

He is charming, when we chat, in his dismissal of Powder as a work from his giddy youth, still only best known through the easy sensationalism of being the first ever opera with a blowjob onstage. He likes to wonder aloud, with typical Brit whimsy, why anyone today takes the work seriously. Defying the possible wrath of parents and trustees, the coproduction last weekend by USC’s Thornton Opera and the L.A. Philharmonic, staged by Ken Cazan and conducted by the composer with an excellent orchestra and a group of gifted student singers, revealed, as all good performances have, that this is indeed a work of lasting strength and originality. If the staging lacked some of the madcap genius of David Schweizer’s Long Beach Opera production from 2001, it represented good, honest stagecraft and made no bones about the work’s less, er, family-fare elements.

The strengths of Powder Her Face outrun its notorious aspects; they lie in Adès’ remarkably canny music. I do not foresee an independent concert life for very much of the music (aside from one nifty song for the Waitress, “Fancy being rich . . . Fancy purchasing a duke!,” that tags her as a blood cousin of Kurt Weill’s Pirate Jenny), but the mix of nowadays-pop sensibility, liberally laced with some X-rated tango slither, accomplishes some highly potent storytelling. Adès is particularly adept at this kind of narrative, with or without words. On December 2 and 3, his orchestral masterpiece (so far), Asyla, is paired at the Philharmonic with Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” symphony, and even though neither work follows a specified narration, both have a program deeply instilled. Be prepared, therefore, for more than just another soiree at Disney Hall.

Adès is here for several events – including a “Green Umbrella” on November 28, at which he will conduct music by his friend Gerald Barry, and a varied program with “Piano Spheres” on December 5. I have the feeling that he likes it here; who knows where that may lead?

Kindred Spirit

Sharing the weekend, most appropriately, was the G-major String Quartet of Franz Schubert, music by another restless spirit in his 20s, no less fearless and forthright. Its opening gambit flings down the challenge: a welcoming chord in G major that swells and bursts into G minor. That sets the tone for the entire work, an instability of major versus minor that permeates all four movements, each in a different manner, and seems on its own to pronounce the death knell of classical stability and balance. There is a miraculous moment later in that first movement, when that opening sequence returns but exactly in reverse: the G-minor chord swelling out to G major, and all, this time, absolutely pianissimo. I wrote last week about music’s great “What hit me?” moments; this is another.

I heard the Schubert, along with quartets of Schumann and Lutoslawski, in the beguiling setting of the Clark Memorial Library in West Adams, where there is chamber music once a month, with tickets trickily distributed on a lottery system. The players were the excellent Vogler Quartet from Berlin, which had also performed in the Doheny Mansion at one of the “Historic Sites” programs two nights before. The room, wood-paneled and with a gorgeous, intricate ceiling, seats a modest 141, which makes it small for chamber music; I found the sound aggressive, sometimes even shrill (likewise MC Peter Reill). I’d like to hear a harpsichord and baroque instruments there.

Glass, Darkly

The peripatetic Long Beach Opera dropped in at the Japan America Theatre last weekend for the latest stop in its yearlong wanderings through operatic curiosities. This item bore names worth noting: composer Philip Glass and his ofttime collaborator playwright David Henry Hwang, whose previous works include such major-league thumpings as The Voyage, the Metropolitan Opera’s big Columbus fiasco. This latest effort, produced with most of the original perpetrators from its American Repertory Theatre premiere in 2003, thumped to a more modest rhythm, but made for a dreary evening nonetheless. “First Philip Glass opera to be staged in L.A.,” screamed the publicity, which is not quite accurate if you remember the 1988 1000 Airplanes on the Roof at UCLA; call it, at least, the first Philip Glass opera to be staged here at a $98 ticket.

The matter at hand was a bill of two short plays, drawn by Hwang from Japanese ghost stories and given the dual title Sound of a Voice/Hotel of Dreams: the first set in ancient times and dealing with a samurai-ghost encounter in the manner of Woman in the Dunes; the second a modern fantasy about a bordello for men at the brink of death. For both, Glass has provided a musical underpinning so thin and aimless that it becomes difficult to identify as a melodic line. Now and then, a short burst from pipa or shakuhachi serves to pin down the ethnic identity, as did conductor Andreas Mitisek’s courageous management of this threadbare substance.

Two singers were involved, both from the original production. Suzan Hanson was the ghost in the first play, the all-knowing Madam in the second. Herbert Perry (the Leporello in the Peter Sellars Don Giovanni of fabled memory) made the switch from samurai to suited businessman. Both sang with force, but in an acoustical setting that tended to swallow words – a serious problem, since the supertitle projector conked out early in the evening. Robert Israel, stalwart stage designer of the Glass entourage, provided his usual – well, stalwart – set design, consisting mainly, in both plays, of a large, empty box. And “empty” was, indeed, the word.

Nothing More Than . . .

The past few weeks have made their mark on my critical apparatus. Johannes Brahms has been his usual nasty scold. Richard Strauss has gone on a rant and a screech. A cadence in a Mozart piano concerto left me numb, and a pileup of dissonances in a Bach cantata brought on a terrifying specter of the wages of sin. It’s all part of the job, of course, and I loved every moment, almost.

I did not – do not – love the C-minor String Quartet of Brahms, however, and cannot imagine why the excellent Calder Quartet devoted their splendid, youthful vigor to the task of turning it into music. To me this music is, in a word, cranky, the more so at Zipper Hall, where it came after the group’s splendid work in the last quartets of Mozart and Bartók. The Calder is well along in the mellowing process needed to produce good chamber ensembles (as with good wine – an apt analogy). They are in residence at the Colburn School, perfecting their art by teaching it to others and emerging for public performances not nearly often enough.

C minor is also the key of the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto, K. 482, which Emanuel Ax played with the Philharmonic and Alexander Mickelthwate this past weekend. Toward the end of that movement, there is a passage of hushed exaltation that belongs among the great “What hit me?” moments in all music. It is nothing more than a sudden shift from minor to major, set as a conversation between soloist and a few instruments from the orchestra, but if you know your Mozart, you know that a “nothing more than” moment can hit you very hard, and so this does. You also have to credit the excellent young Mickelthwate, who is now the Philharmonic’s associate conductor with one hand while conducting the Winnipeg Symphony with the other, for maintaining his composure in a program offering that miraculous Mozart concerto and the billboard-size proclamations of Richard Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben with only the innocuous glitz of the Strauss Burleske to serve as bumper. If the Heldenleben must happen (a proposition I will argue), let it be in this vigorous, propulsive manner. Mr. Mickelthwate led the work without score; I hope he has left room in his head for better things as well.

Singers vs. Sinners

“Stand firm against all sinning,” warns the mezzo-soprano, “or its poison will possess you,” and Bach drives his poisoned needles homeward with shrieking dissonances such that his 1714 audiences might also have asked what mysterious power had smitten them. Even absent their ailing founder and leader, Reinhard Goebel, the strong-hearted ensemble Musica Antiqua Köln reaffirmed their reputation for sending forth sugar-free renditions of early music with its sinews pristine. If Bach’s cantata (No. 54, “Widerstehe doch der Sünde”) was their Disney program’s highlight, the other important message was how pokey and predictable so much of the rest of this ecstatically rediscovered Baroque stuff (Jan Dismas Zelenka, represented on the program by an endless on-and-on vocal motet) can be. Ilia Korol was the substitute leader in this, announced as Musica Antiqua’s farewell tour; Marijana Mijanovic was the vocal soloist, deep-voiced and resplendent.

Three decades before, contemporary with the birth of Bach, Henry Purcell’s music – its passions much colored by his studies of Italian music – also acquired much of the power to disturb and to amaze that would later come to Bach in a different world. At the First Congregational Church in, as you might guess, one of the “Historic Sites” series, which remains unrivaled anywhere else, the small group (five voices plus organ), Paris-based, that calls itself Ensemble européen William Byrd turned Purcell and his French contemporary Marc-Antoine Charpentier into magic on a recent Sunday.

The Purcell group, anthems composed for the newly restored Chapel Royal and most of them from the composer’s 20s, simply throbbed with dramatic force. From Italy he had absorbed the power of dissonance and sudden change. The force that we know in his later works like Dido and Aeneas is already here in, for example, the short three-voice drama Saul and the Witch of Endor, a scene in florid, Italian style in which the troubled Saul, on the eve of battle, begs the Witch to summon up the spirit of the dead Samuel. Under the leadership of the Australian-born Graham O’Reilly, the five Ensemble singers, French and with accents charmingly blended, transformed the music into an audible translation of the great rose window in the apse behind them.

Piping Hot

In 62 years of professional journalism, it has never occurred to me to write about organ music, least of all in a church, until this week. Here’s what happened. Sixty-four years ago, I had a best friend at summer camp; our friendship was cemented by a shared passion for Dvorák’s Cello Concerto, which I had brought with me on the five 78s, not being able to leave them at home. After that summer (1942), we drifted apart until about two months ago, when for a series of delightful reasons we resumed correspondence. He had in the meantime become a renowned anesthesiologist and, as a sideline, a producer of recordings of organ performances by Dr. Gerre Hancock at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. This is one of the great church organs in America, and Dr. Hancock, now at the University of Texas, ranks as one of the great organists of his time, especially with regard to his skill in improvisation. Nothing would do, therefore, but that I make my way to St. James’ Episcopal Church on Wilshire Blvd. last Sunday, to listen to Dr. Hancock’s guest recital and compare his playing with all the discs my newly rediscovered friend has been sending me. (His name is also Alan.)

The improviser’s art is music’s central magic. The repertory sustains itself around its power to state and then to vary; the organ is the supreme exerciser of this power. Dr. Hancock’s program would conclude, it was announced, with an “improvisation on submitted themes” as once did concerts by Mozart and Beethoven. The “submitted theme” this time was John Williams’ tune from Star Wars; one might have expected the worst. One would have been wrong; what we got instead was a beautifully fashioned, sophisticated, four-movement work that strayed far from the given theme, drew a splendid variety of thematic substances from its modest outline, ventured far into dark and complicated regions, and returned triumphant at the end. If this is what I’ve missed by ignoring church music for 62 years, perhaps it’s time to start listening.

Battle of the Brands

At Disney Hall, the conductorless chamber orchestra known as Orpheus performed its brand of Mozart against that of the pianist Emanuel Ax; they did not match. Orpheus, which is popular for the same reasons that attract crowds to blind tenors and one-armed acrobats, is proficient at producing a well-sculpted wall of sound that is little different whether the program calls for Mozart or Copland. “Manny” Ax, on the other hand, is a marvelously sensitive pianist with a deep understanding of the expressive differences between Mozart’s intimate, subtle G-major Concerto (K. 453) and the grand celebrations that fill the C-major work (K. 503) of only two years later. The pianist knew, in other words – as whatever unnamed force that guides the destiny of the orchestra does not – how and why an all-Mozart program is so uniquely stirring a musical experience.

András Schiff also knows, and his solo all-Mozart program at Disney five days later had the planning of a profoundly dedicated musician: small works and large, including less-known pieces that invariably evoke incredulity at their harmonic daring. One small accident marred the event: a dropped cane that went rattling down a long flight of wooden Disney stairs, midway in the amazingly rich B-minor Adagio, but the pianist soon recovered, and so did we. That Adagio, and the A-minor Rondo later in the program, are the pieces that you play to convince yourself of the vast chasm between finger-friendly and deeply profound in the music of this composer whom we will never fully know. I can play those notes, and so can you; we need an András Schiff, or an Emanuel Ax (or a Jeffrey Kahane), to turn them into music.

From an incredibly busy couple of weeks at Disney Hall, you don’t need my words to honor Yo-Yo Ma’s smooth-as-silk (as in “Road”) participation with Ax in a Beethoven program (in which the piano writing was conceived to dominate the cello line anyway) or the no-brain diversion, complete with facial isometrics, concocted by superstar violinist Joshua Bell in the name of the Brahms Violin Concerto this past weekend. Sheer delight on that last program, however (although you’d never know from the limping prose of the stand-in guy at the Times), was the chance to hear the Sixth Symphony of Schubert in the hands of a conductor – Britain’s Jonathan Nott – who really knows and values that small corner of the repertory.

Here is Schubert at 20, feverishly starting new works and tossing them soon after. His wastebasket includes a fabulously beautiful beginning of a piano sonata in F sharp minor (which András Schiff once played on a TV documentary). His completed works include a four-hand piano sonata and a set of variations that everybody should play. This C-major Symphony surpasses all. Its scoring for winds anticipates Mendelssohn; its jog-trotting finale (which Jonathan Nott took at exactly the right “Viennese” pace) cannot be heard without happy smiles.

A Movable Feast

Santa Monica’s Jacaranda Concerts, displaced while their church is being remodeled, zoomed into life somewhere else last weekend, and how! The first notes of Aaron Copland’s Duo for Flute and Piano sounded through the vastness of Santa Monica High’s Barnum Hall shortly after 4 p.m. last Saturday; the final fade-out of Terry Riley’s In C drew the die-hards’ cheers just before midnight. The intervening eight hours had been filled with déjà vu mostly marvelous, a “Pan-American Music Marathon” of some of the best music, in the best performances, that the founders of this treasurable series have brought forth – to an ever-growing, supportive audience – in their past four years.

Like the splendid catered dinner from the Border Grill, the program was a nice mix of flavors and aromas, best exemplified by the inclusion of one of Osvaldo Golijov’s omnium-gatherum pieces to match his own heritage. Eduardo Delgado hammered out a couple of Ginastera’s piano sonatas; Gloria Cheng sailed by on the cloud known as John Adams’ Phrygian Gates; there was lots of Steve Reich but no Philip Glass – my choice too. Only one piece struck me as dull, the finale of Charles Ives’ Trio, and that was preceded by the previous movement, an authentic hoot. After a year of innumerable mistreatments delivered upon Riley’s pioneering masterpiece, it was encouraging to hear the work’s freshness endure and glisten, lovingly delivered, lovingly received.

Best of all, please note, these performers – string quartet, percussion ensemble, soloists, a whole gatherum for the Riley – were all local people. They work in studios, in local orchestras; many of them are from USC or CalArts. It’s when projects like Jacaranda succeed that they are encouraged to remain here rather than plunging into the New York maelstrom. Saturday’s program was broken into segments; the audience could come and go. Around the midpoint, when some of the best past Jacaranda performances – Joel Pargman’s of the Lou Harrison Violin Concerto, John Adams’ Shaker Loops by seven strings – were being returned to life, you got the feeling of a lot of people, in a congenial room, sharing some happy memories.

Obiter dictum: Daniel Cariaga, who left us last week at 71 – much too soon – was that rare phenomenon, a music critic and a gentleman. I met him first in 1980, at one of the early CalArts contemporary-music festivals. It would never have occurred to his boss at the Times, the ferocious Bernheimer, that this was an event demanding a paper’s chief critic. Danny, the second in command, was somewhat at sea during most of that weekend, but everybody admired his forbearance and his good humor, and the fact that he never wrote beyond what he knew. It would be a while before the Times got someone else like that, and the good news is that Danny did some teaching in his last few years. I hope those guys find jobs.