So I've Heard

The Mystery Kid

The young man – the slender, bespectacled, smiling schoolboy – strode to the Disney Hall podium, took his bow, turned to the orchestra. His gestures were modest, sure and eloquent; the curves and pulses of Mozart’s Figaro Overture fell beautifully into place. Whoever he was, the guy obviously knew the music and how to make it come alive.

He is Lionel Bringuier (LEE-oh-nell BRANG-ee-AY), and he has just turned 20. There he stood last Saturday before our formidable Philharmonic, unidentified by previous announcement from the stage or in print; he had replaced the scheduled assistant conductor, Joana Carneiro, at the latest Toyota Symphonies for Youth concert. He had had no benefit of rehearsal, but you wouldn’t have known this from the sparks he gave off on the stage that morning, the sense of assurance in a program of Mozart and Richard Strauss. He was at the end of a three-week visit to the Philharmonic, during which he had been hired by the orchestra to cover such situations as Carneiro being called out of town. He had also triumphed in a competitive audition to become the Philharmonic’s next assistant conductor (overlapping with Carneiro’s final year), a post he will take on next fall.

The buzz from that competition is that all who sat in judgment – conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, orchestra members, Philharmonic president Deborah Borda and several highly placed board members – have been knocked off their collective feet by this small Parisian with the huge talent. And the buzz, inevitably, devolves back to the Philharmonic’s unique history in discovering and holding on to fantastically talented, wet-behind-the-ears conducting talent, with names like Salonen, Simon Rattle, and the current season’s Gustavo Dudamel coming immediately to mind, and the name of Ernest Fleischmann as supersleuth.

Out of 110 videos submitted as applications for the Philharmonic competition, seven conductors were invited to compete in person, leading the orchestra in unrehearsed passages with a judges’ panel seated at a table behind the players. At a Music Center lunch, I wondered to young Lionel how much a competing conductor can reveal about him- or herself in such a high-pressure situation, without the chance of previous rehearsal.

“I think that if you have strong ideas about the music,” he answered in a potpourri of French and English that we had concocted for the occasion, “you should be able to show this with very little talking. To me it is important to prove to the orchestra that you are listening to them, and then they will begin to listen to you, and this begins to happen almost immediately without any necessity to speak. The quality of conducting means to me the quality of listening first; then comes all the rest.

“I was 4 when I knew that music was to be my life. That is when I began to play the cello. My parents have no musical talent, but there are four brothers and sisters, and we all play. One brother and I have a professional duo of cello and piano. By 14, I knew that I wanted to be a conductor. By that time, I had enough musical experience, however, that I didn’t want to be just a 14-year-old conductor, a kind of freak like – we won’t say any names. I was ready for a serious career.”

Yes, he is ready; that you can’t miss. Our lunchtime chat ranged far (the latest word on Formula One car racing, of which news I was a mere recipient) – and wide (the music of Marc-André Dalbavie). One further encouraging newsbit: On good authority I have it that when the victory of Lionel Bringuier was announced at Disney Hall, the members of the Philharmonic – a hard-boiled bunch, as we all know – stood and cheered.

The Finder

Ernest Fleischmann wants me to set the record straight on the story of his “discovery” of Esa-Pekka Salonen, when the young Finn leaped into the breach and replaced Michael Tilson Thomas at a London concert at which Ernest “just happened” to be in attendance. It was much more complicated; Ernest had already left London that day in 1983, and had to be summoned back from Los Angeles in order to catch up on this rising young phenom. In any case, in addition to his many years as Philharmonic honcho, assuring a tradition of stability that few musical organizations can match, Fleischmann is indeed the authoritative tracer of young conductors, a reputation that dates back a quarter-century and more.

Young Lionel first came across his line of sight a year ago, at the 49th running of the prestigious Besançon Competition for young conductors, where the young Parisian scored the same kind of jaw-dropping triumph that he later repeated at Disney Hall. With considerable career advice from Fleischmann, he has been able to develop his French and American triumphs into a career parlay: a part-time post with the small Orchestre de Bretagne, and the Los Angeles job, which will call for a couple of kiddie concerts (this time with name credit), a “Green Umbrella” program, a couple of runouts and – who knows? – a chance to step in when duty calls. He obviously understands the local priorities; he spoke at our last meeting about finding an apartment.?

A Broken Vow

Brett Dean and his music burst rather politely upon the local scene over the past two weeks. Australia born, with several seasoning years as a violist with the Berlin Philharmonic and now a full-time composer back home, Dean produces a kind of internationally amiable music, which is not at all bad. At Disney Hall he came on with a viola concerto, with himself as the able soloist, that lists the Philharmonic as co-commissioner. Viola concertos are not that common; there is a beautiful, dark-hued one by Walton that this new work is qualified to stand beside. Dean’s makes itself known in a soft, understated sort of way, and rises to a fair amount of hurly-burly in its middle movement. It has nothing to do with Australia: no koalas or birdcalls.

These – the birdcalls, anyway – came closer to the surface a few nights later in a Green Umbrella concert, all-Australian, that included not-so-amiable music by Dean, a “Pastoral” Symphony like none other, in which aggregations of native birds compete with the sounds of contemporary industrialized life, and not too happily. Composed in 2001 for Germany’s Ensemble Modern, the piece makes a stunning transition from soulful to soulless and quite overshadowed everything else on this remarkable program. A pair of radiantly alive piano improvs by the 26-year-old whiz-bang composer Anthony Pateras and some aimless note-spinning by Liza Lim (whose music continues to go nowhere with local audiences) completed the evening.

Esa-Pekka Salonen began the Philharmonic’s program with a spirited dash through Haydn’s “Bear” Symphony and a crackerjack romp through the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition, a work I had, not long ago, vowed never to hear again but which, thanks to Donald Green’s red-hot trumpet, I heard with something close to rapture.

Discomania Revisited

Tower Records is gone, and nostalgia stalks the land. The first record store that ever engaged my time and my money was a small hole-in-the-wall across from Boston’s Symphony Hall. My pals Normie and Eddie and I would hike over after school, and the owner, a bustling little guy about the size of his cigar, would let us play some of his records so long as our hands were clean. His name was Jack Levinson, and his own favorite was a 10-inch 78-rpm disc of Heifetz playing “Hora Staccato,” and so we left every day with that thing buzzing in our ears. I bought my first album there: Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, by Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony, on six Victor Black Label discs. Victor had just lowered the price on some of its older 78s, from a dollar to 75 cents, and that gave birth to a new generation of collectors.

After college I moved to New York, and two doors down from my fifth-floor walkup was the Record Collectors’ Exchange, which became my next haunt. This wasn’t much larger than Jack Levinson’s, but it was crammed with really rare stuff – discs from France, from Eastern Europe, used copies of recordings long discontinued. The cigar smoke was even thicker here, and so was the lingo. People would brag about finding a particularly choice item, “gold label.” If the record label was printed with gold ink, that meant it was a prewar pressing, better-quality shellac; that also meant, of course, that Herman Lemberg would mark it up to twice the original price. I always suspected that some of those guys didn’t even own phonographs; it was the collecting impulse, not the music, that drove everybody into that smoke-filled room on West 48th Street. But that was what we knew as a record store, and its graduates went on to run the other hangout shops of the ’50s and ’60s: Will Lerner’s Music Masters on 43rd Street, Joe Greenspan’s Discophile in the Village, and let us shed a tear for Alfred Leonard’s Gramophone Shop on Wilshire – snob shops where the educated clerks wouldn’t allow you to buy a recorded performance they considered below par.

Technology spelled the doom. Starting with the LP in 1948, exploding with hi-fi and tape and stereo and the War of the Speeds – brought on by RCA’s absurd insistence that its 45s were equal to the 33s as a medium for symphony and opera – the great connoisseur medium of bygone days became accessible, inexpensive and amazingly all-inclusive. At the Record Collectors’ Exchange, you could perhaps find one or two Bach cantatas, or early Haydn symphonies, on some obscure European label at some exorbitant price; now the whole Haydn or Bach canon came in duplicate abundance.

The first time I walked into the classical branch of Tower Records in West Hollywood – not many hours after first arriving in Los Angeles in, I think, 1979 – I experienced a feeling exactly the same as at my first sight of the Grand Canyon: exhilaration tempered with helplessness (so much space, so little me). By the mid-’80s, you could paw through maybe 75 versions of the Beethoven Fifth Symphony, with nobody behind the counter – except perhaps a couple of haggling Maria Callas queens – to offer guidance. As someone who, perhaps misguidedly, still nourishes a certain affection for classical music, I have increasingly found the experience of being in the presence of classical merchandising nothing short of appalling. My list is long: placement of classical departments in stores where the sounds of pop feed through, ignorant labeling in the few bins that remain, an inability among personnel to muster even a blank stare in response to a request for information.

As with most people I know, ordering discs by mail order has been the solution to the collecting dilemma since the first signs of collapse appeared in the Towers. There is a small part of me, however, that responds to the experience of getting my hands on some object possibly worth the cherish, and then rushing home to see if I was right. One place remains to afford me that pleasure: the music room of Doug Dutton’s bookstore in Brentwood. It’s small, but somebody has chosen the merchandise with great taste, and is on hand to talk about it. It is, in other words, what a record store could be, used to be, ought to be – minus the cigar smoke, that is.

The Ring? Wrongly Rung

The performance annals of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung abound in tales of solemn ritual, of audiences driven to ecstasy thousands at a time, of published philosophical analyses by the ream. To George Bernard Shaw’s Perfect Wagnerite, the heroic Siegfried is the nihilist Mikhail Bakunin reborn; to Anna Russell, he is Li’l Abner. Nobody merely attends performances of The Ring; the operative word is pilgrimage. Whether that is exactly the first definition that comes to mind during freeway traffic on a Friday afternoon on I-405, or while experiencing a damp sandwich, standing up for lack of lobby space, elbow to elbow with a jabbering Ringling in plastic Wagnerian helmet, I leave you to decide.

Yet those four days at Costa Mesa – celebrating not the 20-year-old-and-already-shabby Segerstrom Hall but the glossy new one still being worked on across the way – added up to a Ring of sorts, if a Ring fashioned as though from the far side of the moon. “You have to remember,” a friend wisely noted during one of the endless intermissions, “that in Russia there was no 20th century.” Wagner had gone unstaged there since before the First World War, until the defiant Valery Gergiev forced a rediscovery on his forces at the Kirov Opera in the late 1990s. This Ring, brought to these shores by Kirov forces that looked like a fair portion of St. Petersburg’s population, was listed as a “conception,” not a stage direction, by Gergiev and the designer George Tsypin (he of the recent Grendel and its famous wall). Absent any more specific clues, it seemed to be a creation that had been allowed to grow of its own cumulative energy. Ideally, that can turn a stage into something very exciting, a massive improvisatory force joined toward some end. Otherwise, it can result in a mess.

This one was a mess. On a stage that looked as if someone had simply overturned the contents of some theatrical warehouse in which most of the props were damaged anyhow, gaunt giants stood by, encircling the stage, some headless (like the ones in the Long Beach Opera’s mini-Ring last January and just as useless), some with heads that lit up from inside like distorted lava lamps. Smaller, bulbous creatures with single headlamps were scattered here and there; the sharp-eyed Bernie Holland of The New York Times spotted them as Shmoos, enhancing the Li’l Abner identity. Singing actors of varying levels of proficiency trudged through a fair likeness of Wagner’s music – in itself one of the world’s awe-inspiring creations. Awe-inspiring, too, was Gergiev’s command of the rise and fall, the surge and the impetus of this incredible score – including, by the way, several passages usually cut that were left intact this time.

The problems were compounded, however: first because, though the orchestra itself – as the world has discovered on its previous visits – is a force of awesome resonance and beauty of tone, in Segerstrom Hall it was obliged to play in a pit too small and too poorly designed to show off its splendor. The mess was further thickened because the casting night after night seemed to have been carried out on an eeny-meeny-choice basis, seldom with any two singers properly matched. I heard excellent tenors (our own Plácido, for one) matched with small-voiced sopranos, a wooly-voiced Wotan past his prime with a Walküre Brünnhilde of splendid strength, a first-rate Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde against a wimp of a Hagen (in drag, by the way) who was also greatly outsung by the Gunther whom he is supposed to dominate. It would have taken the acumen of Stalin’s secret police to determine, from the various printed programs, which singer was actually singing which role on which night. I would swear, for example, that the aforementioned “Brünnhilde of splendid strength” was the same terrific soprano (Olga Sergeyeva) on three consecutive nights; the programs had it otherwise. Oh, and I almost forgot, the Siegfried who looked so svelte in his red jammies one night was replaced the next night by a chubbier hero trying to fit into the same clothes, but not quite at home there.

Not Only Godunov, but Better

The Russian forces encamped at Costa Mesa for this 17-day “Maryinsky Festival” sufficed to populate two full opera projects, plus ballet and symphony galore. Nothing in these offerings proved more valuable, however, than the four performances of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, the most prototypical and, up to now, most inexplicably neglected hereabouts of all great Russian works of art. Even in its later, bowdlerized transformations – its harmonies and orchestrations sweetened by lesser hands, its plotlines tampered with by the addition of love duets and a ballet – our local companies have shied away from Boris as if it were something other than the raw, daring, imperfect but astonishing masterpiece it truly is. In its original 1869 form, it was rejected by the ancestral Kirov company, which then triumphed mightily with bastardized versions. Three cheers and a “Slava!!!” then for the intrepid Gergiev, who brought the original Boris back to the company in 2002, recorded it and has taken it on tour.

Another few cheers, as well, for the result. There is undeniably great music in the additions made by Mussorgsky himself in his 1872 revision: the mighty choruses in the “Coronation” scene, the scene in the Kromy Forest with the Idiot’s monologue that provides the opera’s devastating ending. The five-CD Philips recording led by Gergiev is the ideal way to compare 1869 and 1872. It contains both versions; the 1869 Boris is the marvelous Nicolai Putilin, who also sang the role in Orange County last Sunday, the best single performance I heard during the entire Kirov visit.

But the 1869 Boris is more than a rough sketch. Its very terseness lays bare its personal drama. From the moment in the dialogue with the sardonic Shuisky when the specter of oncoming doom is laid bare, through to the end, the music doesn’t waste a breath, and neither do you. Suddenly, all that hanky-panky with gods and dragons from the previous nights seemed in retrospect like four nights of Ring Around the Rosie – fun, though.?

Zero Decibels

About an hour before the start of the Philharmonic’s subscription season on September 29, a friend and I were ushered into the empty Disney Concert Hall by an orchestra official. My friend had never seen the hall; I, of course, have made it my second home. Even so, I needed the reminder of that phenomenon, the extreme silence of the place at rest, the design triumph of architect Gehry and acoustician Toyota. The day before, there had been a nonsubscription “Gala” concert, which Esa-Pekka Salonen and the orchestra began with the delicacies of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, an exquisite seasonal statement that the time of Hollywood Bowl-quality sound had passed and the sound of real music had begun. That moment of silence the next night (which would soon be followed with the irresistible racketing of Mahler’s Third Symphony) filled out the message.

The “Gala” program included another treasure, one that had people wondering where it had been all our lives: Manuel de Falla’s Master Peter’s Puppet Show. The work sets an episode from Don Quixote, and calls for live performers and/or life-size puppets in a mix with a chamber orchestra, using an episode from the Cervantes comedy that ends, as most of them do, in Quixotic chaos. This staging, by puppeteer Basil Twist – acclaimed most recently for his underwater production of Berlioz’s “Fantastic” Symphony in New York but not yet here – used the Disney organ loft and surrounding space, and did so with high imagination.

In all its 80-plus years, the Philharmonic had never once performed Falla’s small masterwork; in that span, the Mahler Third had turned up heaven knows how many dozen times. That tells us nothing, of course, about good music versus bad; I’ve never heard anyone advance notions about the Mahler Third being a good work, as I might hear about the Ninth, or Das Lied von der Erde. It belongs in the special category I’ve concocted known as Fun-Bad Works, and I suppose I should work up that list one of these days. (Let’s see . . . we can start off perhaps with Porgy and Bess or Tannhäuser.)

I love all that masquerading in the Mahler Third: the fake blood that oozes constantly in the first movement while Mahler giggles up his sleeve, and the delicious pomposity at the end, where the crowd really ought to be forced to its feet singing patriotic verses as white doves are released. It’s all a great con; Esa-Pekka rode the work to his position of eminence, but now that he no longer needs it, it has become his albatross. He leads his orchestra and the kiddie chorus most eloquently though its fraudulent measures, and through the sincere ones as well. At one time the Third served to prove his worthiness; now it is no longer worthy of him. Fifteen minutes of Ravel’s shimmering suite of childhood fantasies the night before told us far more about our marvelous conductor and the orchestra he has made for us.

Manon Second

It has taken 20 years for the Los Angeles Opera to produce romantic French opera in a musical style recognizable, respectful and altogether endearing. Like a warm and loving French kiss so perfectly placed that you never want it to end, the Manon currently at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion speaks (and sings!) in accents so impeccably Russian and Mexican (among others) that they somehow result in the absolute French manner, the absolute enchantment of the blend of twinkling jewelry (even if sometimes costume) and twinkling lovespeak (even if sometimes fraudulent) that blends into French Romanticism at its most seductive. From the regally Russian Anna Netrebko and the slimily seductive Mexican Rolando Villazón comes authentic French lovemaking/hate-spinning that can send you up walls with its realness. Even the tentative baton of Plácido Domingo, this time around, sounds real. Still . . .

There remains about this production a sense of the French-opera-for-those-afraid-of-French-opera. Cuts abound; nearly an hour of music is missing, which begins to impinge on matters of responsibility. These matters are also engaged in the spirit of Vincent Paterson’s staging (he of Madonna, Michael Jackson and Kiss of the Spider Woman), in which onstage lighting equipment and cameras move in and around the crowd scenes, switching the sense of time and place from fin-de-siècle France to commencement-de-siècle Hollywood. Someone, you get the feeling, still hasn’t learned to trust Monsieur Massenet and his very pretty opera. That someone, I get the feeling, ought to unstuff his ears and listen to the treasures at hand.

Afloat

Not having 2,000-year-old ears (in spite of those letters, folks), I cannot deliver an insider’s evaluation on the Suzhou Kun Opera Theater of China’s Jiangsu Province or its production of The Peony Pavilion at Royce Hall. It would be equally foolish, however, to seek refuge behind historic and cultural time and miss out on the enormous and infinitely accessible pleasures these people brought to our midst in three sold-out nights of intense musical drama. Clearly visible and audible at every moment were pride of ownership and the privilege of sharing. I wonder what an analogue might be: something so deeply embedded in a nationality that it can travel and be shared with such integrity. (If Porgy and Bess is your answer, we are truly beset.)

Pride and dedication drove the wonderful singers, who were not so much beautiful to hear as intense and amazingly clear. With the torrent of events these past weeks – not to mention Orange County’s Ring, which I’ll get around to next week – I was able to hear only the last of the three live performances; there is also on DVD, of course, an abridged version of another telling of the Peony Pavilion love legend. Nowhere in my memories of musical drama, live or recorded, is there anything so culturally distant from my own experience as this one live performance, yet so artistically close.?

Best Fiddler’s Friend

Down the pathway beside the house on the West L.A. hillside, past the red door and down the steps, Kyozo Watanabe sits surrounded by bright, gleaming, brand-new stringed instruments: s, violas, cellos, perhaps a few double basses – enough to start up a full-size philharmonic, with enough for a chamber-music concert to spare. “There is no instrument here that I made,” says the soft-spoken, smiling Watanabe with some pride, “but there is no instrument here that I won’t make better.”

Some instruments were made in China, mass-produced of perfectly good wood – maple and spruce, some native Chinese, some from Sri Lanka – but not very good quality overall before arriving in Watanabe’s Cremona Violin Shop. “They are all what I call ‘China basic.’ You can buy instruments like this right out of the box in big stores for under $200, and give them to beginning children and make them think they are playing a violin. What I do is to add at least $165 worth of improvements: a better bridge, fingerboard, pegs, a soundboard. I can sell the finished product for only a couple of hundred dollars more, but it’s a real instrument.

“If music is going to survive, the first thing we have to insist upon is that beginning students must have good instruments. A child starting in is surely no more talented than the violin in his hands, and if it’s a bad violin that can’t respond to what he expects out of music, he simply gets discouraged and gives up. I don’t mean he has to start in with a Stradivarius. It’s just that he can’t start out with a piece of junk, or a toy.” Watanabe’s mission is to furnish the newcomer (of any age, by the way) with the first real instrument of his life in music.

Born in Japan, Watanabe commuted from Munich to the Bavarian town of Mittenwald, which, like Italy’s Cremona, is one of the world’s learning places for violin craftspeople. His wife, Miwako, was a member of the fondly remembered Sequoia String Quartet and still performs in chamber concerts here and in the Bay Area and elsewhere in the world. Watanabe himself is neither a retired virtuoso nor a frustrated conductor; his serenity and quiet humor bespeak a man who’s doing in life exactly what he wants to do.

CREMONA VIOLIN SHOP 3213 Midvale Ave., West L.A., by appointment at (310) 475-5897

Gloria in Excelsis

The crowd at Zipper Hall last Tuesday night, for the first of this season’s “Piano Spheres” concerts, was one of those spectacles that renew your confidence in the future of energetic, serious musical programming. These concerts have been going on now for 12 years, and the audience has steadily increased while the programs themselves have become more and more adventurous – including not only great works of the piano repertory but some interesting wanderings afield. Last week’s big work had begun life as part of a string quartet; another was built around the reading of a sad and sexy poem. I heard nobody complain that there wasn’t enough piano.

That’s because the pianist was Gloria Cheng, one of the series’ great founding spirits and a superb adventurer on her own. The big work was the “Great Fugue” of Beethoven’s Opus 130 String Quartet, bipolarity in music if anything ever was, in a keyboard transcription that Beethoven may or may not have had anything to do with. Robert Winter delivered some of his typical madcap program notes and joined Gloria in a two-piano reading of similar quality that had to put everything else on the program somewhat in the shade. “Everything else” included some rather harebrained Beethovenesque variations by Saint-Saëns and the delightfully footloose Hallelujah Junction by John Adams (both also for two pianos, with the two splendid conductors Neal Stulberg and Grant Gershon on the second), as well as some morose bits by Thomas Adès in anticipation of his full participation on the next “Spheres” program come December.

Two movements from Stephen Andrew Taylor’s Seven Memorials made no stronger case for this composer than the complete performance had two years ago. Never mind: Overall, this was another cherishable concert, music for the thinking listener by the thinking musician. The season has begun.

People in Glass Houses .?.?.

They built it, and we came.

Nonchalantly tripping over the TV cables in the plaza where the lima beans once grew, brushing away the cinders from the fireworks that hailed the inaugural of their new concert hall, the folk of County Orange cornered one another, and waylaid the visitors just in from I-405. Had their Millennium now truly dawned? they wondered; could the Boston Symphony, and Carnegie Hall, and those pretenders from beyond the mountains now truly eat their hearts out in sheer envy? “No, not yet,” the answer seemed to resound, “but any day now.”

The journalistic hoo-hah that greeted the unveiling of Costa Mesa’s Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall was, of course, not a decibel less than the building’s $200 million price tag merited. Read carefully some of the meticulous prose – Daniel J. Wakin in The New York Times, for example, or Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post – and the undertones begin to rise to the surface.

.?.?. Shouldn’t Stow Thrones

“We’re in complete control of our artistic destiny,” Mr. Wakin has Henry Segerstrom, realtor, former bean farmer, telling his new tenant, the Orange County Pacific Symphony. “The hall can do anything you guys can do.” That being so, I don’t see much “destiny” in the freelance orchestra that shivered its way through a Mahler symphony on its first night in its new hall (a performance norm in recent years) and mounted three half-baked performances of Lou Harrison under the rubric of an “American Composer Festival” last spring (while the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Minimalist Jukebox” festival, I might as well notice, was drawing worldwide notice and worldwide participation).

Mr. Kennicott, meanwhile, has our Gubernator Schwarzenegger, whose homeland offers such acoustic and architectural splendors as the Vienna Musikverein and that city’s Philharmonic, pronouncing the Segerstrom masterpiece as “the best in the world,” which ought to be of some use in the Angelides camp. Okay. So there were those pretty-good fireworks, a pretty-good sit-down dinner, and Pacific Symphony honcho John Forsyte (not so long ago of the Kalamazoo Symphony), now flashing his supersmile, mouthing off about comparisons with Boston and New York. The next few months at the new hall offer a few serious concerts, and lots of pop and ice shows. Next door, at the old hall, there is some opera, as usual.

The promotion circulating around Costa Mesa’s new hall, in the reams of wastepaper that have landed on my doorstep in recent weeks and in the civic bluster at the ceremonies in recent weeks, might lead one to believe that the construction of this large bubble of glassy glitz signals some kind of much-needed cultural advance for its area. I wish I could believe that, because I do believe that a major musical force in Orange County, with genuine musical talent at its core and energetic, enterprising programming as its purpose, can succeed as well as anywhere else in this interesting nation. Unfortunately, in Orange County, perhaps more than elsewhere, a preponderance of overambitious, unrealistic leadership has gotten there first. What I would suggest, while there is still some land available down there, is for someone to plant a few lima beans, wait a couple of years and start all over again.

Impossible? Check out the history of “Piano Spheres” and ask yourself once more.?

To Hell With Perfection

Don Carlo is Verdi’s Everest, its peak shrouded, unattainable, magnificent. The Los Angeles Opera’s current version, at the Music Center through October 1, handily measures the company’s emergence as a major performing force since its previous stab at the work (April 1990, a quick, pathetic replacement for a scheduled Pique Dame), ranking, by the same token, as its best Verdi since . . . well, since ever. The gorgeous physical production, dark as nobly shed blood, looks the way the music sounds. Philip II of Spain sings of the gloomy “stone vaults under the Escorial,” and John Gunter’s designs set those vaults to a dismal dance on their own that is just right. When the King collapses back into the folds of his throne, his royal presence diminished to a meager wisp in the strangulation of the Grand Inquisitor’s menacing tones, can any of us out front in the cavernous theater not share the chill, the sudden emptying of humanness that comes with the music, the bleakness forming a vacuum that drains us all? What is there in opera to match that moment? What more ardently proves the power of that kind of music to hold every listener by the knots in the spine and manipulate our willing bones beyond the power – beyond the need, even – to resist?

Whatever the magic, James Conlon and his orchestra achieved exactly that result at their opening Don Carlo, and if I had my way, I would post their achievement – which included the stupendous King Philip of Ferruccio Furlanetto and the Inquisitor of Eric Halvarson (like a pair of haggling contrabassoons), along with the chilling Eboli of Dolora Zajick, a couple of octaves higher, and the not-bad Carlo of Salvatore Licitra, much improved from his over-promoted days as Pavarotti redux – as the standard to which any and all modern opera companies might strive. This being Verdi’s longest and most crag-strewn opera, the perfect performance exists only in the sternest musicologist’s dreams, and the deviations between this or any contemporary staging and Verdi’s original intent add up to quite a list. The language – not French but Italian – is wrong. One whole act is missing. A ballet has been omitted (thank heaven), and a number of smaller cuts, more or less important, have been observed. If you let these things bother you, you’ll probably never witness even a halfway-satisfactory Don Carlo (which this one is, and more), and thereby you will miss one of opera’s greatest treasures.

Down Costa Mesa Way

The champagne – pink, mostly – flowed freely; the Orange County damsels pushed their hors d’oeuvres, doing their best not to trip over miles of video and light cables that turned the plaza into Sargasso. Like an elderly relative dolled up for the party but seated on the sidelines, the “old” Segerstrom Hall (a mere 19, actually) dangled a few strings of neon like last year’s costume jewelry. Attention, of course, was focused on the parvenu across the way, the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, the $200 million worth of glass bubble that opened its doors last Friday night for the first of an oddly situated set of events that will turn this Segerstrom real estate into more of a cultural center, needed or not. The best of the celebratory concerts, actually, will take place in the old hall. It’s just that operas and ballets are more celebratory than mere symphony concerts, and the new hall, like Disney, has no place for a pit.

And so the fanciest wingdings go on somewhere else: in the older Segerstrom, with its grandiose but wacko seating plan. Normally, bigtime concert halls go with bigtime symphony orchestras offering bigtime concert schedules (e.g., Disney Hall). The Orange County Pacific Symphony plays a far smaller schedule despite its dreams-of-glory gestures (e.g., last season’s European trip). Even beyond the small disaster near the end of last week’s inaugural concert, an electronic glitch whose origin is still under debate as I write, the orchestra’s performance of the Mahler First under Carl St. Clair was strictly small-scale: a bad horn night, for starters. The Pacific Symphony Board does a pretty good job of pretending like big time: lots of commissioning of “safe” composers. Everyone is careful not to mention St. Clair’s predecessor, Keith Clark, although his performance of Schönberg’s Gurrelieder was one of the area’s most famous fiascoes.

The new hall is pleasantly small, welcoming about 2,000 on seats of light-colored maple and bright-red fabric. The sound of the Mahler was clean and dry; I heard everything with proper clarity, but St. Clair’s performances are hard to remain awake for even at best. The new work, a set of García Lorca texts composed by William Bolcom for Plácido Domingo, was very much wide-awake, however: passionate music with humorous asides, set down with the consideration a superior composer can muster for what a great but aging singer can produce. Quite frankly, I expected something far kindlier; these are strong, gorgeous pieces, and I can only hope that Plácido has the generosity to pass them on into the repertory.

Sitting It Out

My attendance record at the Hollywood Bowl being no cause for shame most of the season, I allowed myself the indulgence of denying my company to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, which ended the “classical” portion of the season that final Thursday. The night had turned cold; the gin had run low; there are few works I despise more thoroughly, and for a greater number of reasons. Just the thought of this bespectacled, small-minded pedant amusing his Führer by constructing this lurid travesty, assuming the small fragments out of ancient German songbooks and twisting them into beer-hall jabberings as if to reinvent a new musical language, is offensive enough. The ugliness of this vulgar work would offend me even if the text were pure, serene and biblical; it is none of these. Listen to the exquisite original medieval “Burana” songs on disc and grieve for the fate of German art.

Earlier on, the program was the young Jefferson Friedman’s tone poem constructed in honor of the famous sculptural grouping at the Smithsonian The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, the visionary creation by handyman William Hampton. Young (32) Friedman was on hand; he plans to incorporate his shiny, charming piece into a musical triptych honoring “outsider” artists and their inspirational, shimmering artworks. This one certainly does.?

The New Regime

La Traviata was my first opera; wasn’t it everybody’s? Jan Peerce howled and wobbled; Jarmila Novotna sobbed. Nobody noticed whether the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra played in tune; from a vantage point in the standing room at the back of a Boston movie palace, it couldn’t have mattered much. The distance between that glorious Saturday afternoon and last week’s was measurable in more than miles. It became apparent about two minutes into the exquisitely paced, shaded performance of the sad, sad Prelude under the company’s new music director, James Conlon. It began to widen with the first words of greeting from the company’s new Violetta, Renée Fleming of the gorgeous, floating tones but in more gorgeous, floating tones even by her usual standards. It burst into incandescence as that seductive hunk of Latino tenor, Rolando Villazón, shaped the first phrase of his “Un dì felice” into the musical equivalent of diamonds and rubies.

Suddenly it became clear why people fish their black tie out of mothballs on a sweltering Saturday to parade around like penguins in a stuffy lobby, spill drinks on one another, shriek like boobies when high notes resound, and dump $6 million moneybags toward the building of some 18-hour proto-Freudian production far down the line, all just to prove that the magic word “Ring” holds the same thrall over humankind’s gold as it did in Wagner’s hands 150 years ago. The power that makes otherwise rational people behave this way, including now and then the writer of these words, became once again audible when Fleming and Villazón merged tonsils in that Act 1 duet from Verdi’s La Traviata, and then went on to finish the work in like fashion. It didn’t even matter that the production was the same clunky stagecraft that Momma Domingo had inflicted upon the Chandler Pavilion in two previous seasons, with its overpopulated floor and clotted action patterns – which she had replaced one time only with an even more unconscionable updating. This time around, with musical forces such as these onstage and on the podium, Verdi conquered all.

The Other Coast

Kyle Gann (Dallas, 1955- ) is a composer (microtonal; music with complex tempo structures); musicologist (late-20th-century American music); ——–
AUTHOR of books with a leaning toward American eccentric composers (Conlon Nancarrow, La Monte Young); associate professor at Bard College; writer of PostClassic, a web log at Arts Journal; and music critic (1986-2005) at our associate publication The Village Voice. Music Downtown (UC Press, $19.95) contains about 100 of Gann’s 500 Voice articles. A valuable insight into his state of mind, and into his cloudless-clear expressive style, is his September 8 blog entry, “Ignoring Progress” (www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/), his answer to a questioner who insists that music history must entail growth in stylistic complexity, that every generation of composers inevitably builds on the subtlety and sophistication of the preceding generation.

Subtly applying his own views as an acupuncturist might his set of needles, Gann proceeds to devastate his questioner’s straight-line view of history, tracing the rise and fall of relationships between the stylistic curve of, say, the early Aaron Copland and the social conditions surrounding his ventures into cowboy ballets at one time and nontonal chamber music at another, and adapting his more curvaceous view of history to The Way Things Actually Are – in music and elsewhere as well. His path in this one brief but valuable article leads to the nearly 300 pages of Music Downtown, a tough but exhilarating panorama of a turbulent time and place in our music, still very much aboil – although its most eloquent Voice has undergone something of a diminuendo in its coverage of serious new music.

I suppose I need to invoke full disclosure along about here, not only about my own place within this organization but also about my own recent book that is also largely a collection of published articles originally printed out of the same corporate ink pot. But somehow the contrast between my So I’ve Heard and Kyle’s collection feels about as contentious as the struggle between a set of banana-cream-pie how-tos and Kyle’s uncle’s crippling chili recipe (also on the site). I scarcely know Kyle Gann, but I would proudly share a bookshelf with this and all his books.

Downtown music, as I glean from the many definitions set forth or implied in Gann’s collection, is the music that happens in the area of Manhattan below 14th Street – but spills over into Brooklyn, Queens, San Diego and any other fertile land where the spirit can thrive, where the venues are small but barely adequate to the ardor of the crowds. The music is what it is; one of Gann’s delicious definitions early on is “that it is only as good as it sounds.” But that is already distinction enough to set it apart from “Uptown” music, which exists on charts and diagrams that can be published and pored over by critics and doesn’t really need hearing at all. The ranks of “Uptown Composers,” says Gann, embrace the likes of Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt. There is a “Midtown” subgroup, he adds, more likely to bear the taint of Juilliard than the Uptowners’ Columbia: John Corigliano, Joan Tower and Bill Bolcom, for example. John Cage, who died before assuming the mantle, is of course the acknowledged Saint of Downtown. I like to let myself believe that my own 15 pages on John Cage qualify me for at least part-time membership in Kyle’s Downtown club.

It’s in the matter of journalistic criticism – meaning to a New York-based writer, of course, the Times – that Gann’s venom flows full and deep. Most of his collected writing is from his earlier years at The Voice, when he pretty much had the quality-criticism scene to himself. Alex Ross hadn’t yet come to The New Yorker nor Jeremy Eichler to the Times. Uptown criticism (“the heroism-detecting machine”) raged full force. The death of Cage in August 1992 loosed a torrent of vitriol from the New York press comparable to that attendant on the passing of any Nazi tyrant. Gann, of course, screamed back, and then wrote his own John Cage obituary – the final pages in his book – which you have to read, and then go back and read again, and come away aware that, even now, in this shaky, maligned and underpopulated profession that Kyle Gann and I and a few others attempt to practice, there are things worth saying and ways in which to say them.

Concert Mastery

The annual schizophrenic week of the music season is upon us: the time of overlap that ordains the alternation of Hollywood Bowl picnic supper one night and grand opera, with mandatory matching socks, at the Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the next. The transition this time has been neatly handled; nothing paves the path from the wordless passions of the concert stage to the explicit dynamics of the dying heroine better than a good, lusty concerto. Last week’s Bowl programming was notably generous in that regard. You mightn’t have gotten that idea from the local press, but it was there nonetheless.

Something about the Brahms Violin Concerto and the Bowl come together to overcome my reservations about the place and my distaste for the work itself. It has always been that way. There is a memory of a magical evening – Carlo Maria Giulini conducting, Itzhak Perlman as soloist, sometime around 1983 – that I invoke on my inner Victrola at times of stress; it’s always there for me. Last week’s performance may not have reached that luxurious eloquence, but it was splendid on its own level. Martin Chalifour, the Philharmonic’s all-knowing concertmaster, was the soloist, using his exceptional sense of ensemble to play in and around his colleagues. Xian Zhang, the evening’s guest conductor, just about half Chalifour’s height, concocted an admirable rapport between soloist and orchestra, something as agreeable to hear as to watch on the video screens (intelligently used this once). Much has been made of Ms. Zhang’s quick success as the New York Philharmonic’s associate conductor; it was somewhat demeaning to bring her all the way here to divide labors on a concerto and deliver nothing more on her own than a flashy Prokofiev ballet. More, please.

Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto was the work at hand at the Bowl two nights later, music so unproblematically likable that its genuine points of subtlety often pass by unnoticed. There are many: abrupt changes of key brought on rudely and dramatically within this otherwise polite and undramatic context; a sudden prospect of paradise as the solo clarinet takes hold in the slow movement; a delicious thumbing of the nose as the closing measures knock you off your seat. Maybe your grandmother had the Beethoven First in her piano lessons at the academy, but there’s more to the work than that, and Ingrid Fliter, that marvelous prizewinner who burst upon us last spring as a substitute for Martha Argerich (which is a career in itself), proved at the Bowl that her span of insights, her command of the work’s expressive range, was more than a mere one-shot. Our Philharmonic’s own diminutive assistant-about-to-become-associate conductor, Alexander Mickelthwate, was the capable collaborator.

On his own, Mickelthwate led the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony in a manner tense and original. Popular as the work has become – “to its detriment and maybe ours” do I hear someone whisper? – the votes are not yet counted on the “definitive” (hateful word) Shostakovich Fifth, from the broad, dark panoramas outlined in Kurt Sanderling’s hourlong Philharmonic performance, which I cherish on tapes, from the ’80s, to Zubin Mehta’s zippy vulgarity, which he still inflicts. From Mickelthwate the other night, I heard a clear, reasoned approach to the Fifth, nicely restrained so that the structural details – the simplicity in the way large, forceful themes metamorphose to jagged versions of themselves – stood out under the bright orchestration. Intrusions, including, at a crucial point in the slow movement, a garrulous pack of cruising coyotes, reminded us that summer still had some time remaining, and it was overall a fine night to be at the Bowl.

Words’ Worth

I had my own reasons for feeling this way; others had others. In last Thursday’s Times, I learned from the words of one Adam Baer that Martin Chalifour “remained keenly aware of how to perform as a team player” and shared “rhythmic landings [!] with Zhang while drawing rich-sounding [nonexistent] arpeggios from his instrument.” The slow movement, our man in Box 830 seems to have noticed, was “sung lyrically, with a touch of speed [huh?],” which sounds to me like some kind of disagreement in tempo. No, it sounds like somebody using words for no real reason.

Look around, as many do nowadays, at the news of classical music’s sad decline in popularity, at the box office and at the now-disappearing record store; sooner or later, some of the blame descends upon the pall of ignorance that envelops the consuming public. Who’s around these days to write to the 12,000 people who heard Chalifour’s moving and beautiful version of the Brahms Concerto and the Prokofiev ballet music on a balmy night – or to the nearly 7,000 who heard this marvelous young Argentine pianist (“ending long phrases not with a bang but with a Mozartean rounding-off”) and our own superb young conductor doing great Beethoven and Shostakovich – and come back in the city’s one and only culturally responsive newspaper to help them put a value on what they heard and why? The jilted listeners find, instead, the gibberish of an Adam Baer or a Chris Pasles, or a couple of other preening dilettantes of comparable brainpower who throw a lot of artsy words around at the cultural life of this growing community, and nobody cares about stuffing a rag into their word processors.

I am a member of an endangered species. Encountering dangerous members of the species makes me frightened or sick, especially at 82. I happen to think that I am better than a lot of them, on the strength of having studied with superior teachers and stayed awake in their classrooms. (The best of them, Joseph Kerman, wrote a book whose title I stole for this article. I also dedicated my own recent book to him.) The best of the active critics are Mark Swed, Alex Ross and, I guess, myself. All three of us have four-letter names. But so does Adam Baer, so this proves nothing.?

One of a Kind

Few musical works of consequence have endured the variety of treatment, ranging from the ecstatic to the abusive, that befalls Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Even though its time in the spotlight has been relatively brief (composed around 1715, it never really attracted notice until some 200 years later), the musical world has made up for lost time with plenty to spare. The work’s shabby treatment at the Hollywood Bowl last week, dubbed “a mess” far too kindly by the Times‘ Mark Swed, was by no means the worst misuse visited upon this otherwise charming, imaginative, inventive and infinitely beautiful music.

What is there about The Seasons that invites such wanton tampering – a transformation at the Bowl into a raucous and out-of-focus salsa travesty, elsewhere mutations into a Yiddish-cum-klezmer songfest, fodder for a koto-based rock band, a tango fest, tunes to download to your cell phone? Nobody has vented this violence on any other of Vivaldi’s 600 concerti or those of Corelli or Geminiani. Vivaldi here stands forth as the victim of his own ingenuity, the ——–
AUTHOR of a one-of-a-kind set of serenely simple-minded sonnets celebrating the rural life during the passing of the seasons, and of the musical settings to accompany those verses day by day. There is nothing particularly earthshaking in the poems, nor scenic in their scene painting; dogs bark, flies buzz, thunder roars, warm feelings at the fireside are underscored by a warm-hearted tune. The pictorial elements are common stuff; they abound in poems and pictures of the time, including the deservedly famous set by Boucher. Other composers have tried their hands at programmatic effects, often with much more sophisticated musical usage – the “Biblical Sonatas” of Johann Kuhnau, for example, in which the stone from David’s sling all but hits you in your eye. Yet it’s the pretty tunes of Vivaldi that light the lights.

Kuhnau and Vivaldi make their programmatic points far better on their own than all the interfering forces the other night from Jimmy Bosch’s Salsa Dura band and the acrobatic fiddling of Pekka Kuusisto (which was, at least, cute if painfully overdrawn). It was most of all depressing to find in the middle of all this conductor Nicholas McGegan, the excellent Britisher who has led some of the most honest and forthright performances of music of this genre – on discs and even at the Bowl. For about five minutes in this grossly over-calculated concert, in fact, there was a brief visitation by the McGegan of old: the slow movement of a Handel concerto (Opus 3 No. 2), with the solo oboe of Anne Marie Gabriele fashioning a silver thread directly to the stars, and the strings around her in hushed reverence.

Come to think of it, it strikes me that the classical-music audience this summer has been shortchanged more than this once, in that several “Classical Nights” among the promised “Symphonies Under the Stars” have turned into something more like “Perversions Under the Planets.” First there was the night of Amadeus, too much of that particular dramatic travesty luridly read, too little music. There followed a dance program of shredded Bach bits. Then came this Vivaldi, and on September 12 comes a program of film bits conducted not by John Mauceri – who knows how to vitalize this kind of presentation – but by Leonard Slatkin, who surely must have other music to offer. Four “classic” nights out of 10 this summer turn out “classic” only by the most generous stretch of the imagination.

Angels in America

In these doleful days of the disappearing disc, there is infinite heartsease in the latest treasure from Harmonia Mundi, wherein Anonymous 4, that superlative distaff ensemble that first sang its way into our hearts via the abstruse meanderings of ancient polyphonies, lately turns its collective imagination and glorious intonation toward our own indigenous lore. Gloryland is their second disc, after American Angels (2003), to re-create the heritage of American gospel, revival and rural folk song; the new issue adds the artful collaboration of violinist Darol Anger and Mike Marshall on mandolins and guitar.

It’s difficult to describe the beauty of these two discs, simply because my eyes fill and I can’t see to type. The purity of the four voices – Marsha Genensky, Susan Hellauer, Jacqueline Horner (relatively new to the group) and Johanna Maria Rose – renders the lines of the 14th-century polyphonies astonishingly clear without compromising the harmonies toward a later style. Some of that identity with very old musical textures carries over here as well; naive as those old revival singers may have been, their singing reached toward an artistry, and there are counterpoints in these old hymnals and other collections that combine into sonorities simply beautiful by any measurement. ?I defy anyone to make his or her way through No. 5, the gospel song “Where we’ll never grow old,” without picking up the needle, or pushing the button – or whatever it is that people do these days – to play the song once again, and then again.

What astounds me no less is the richness in the solo singing: the way Bronx-born Susan, to cite one example of many, sings of “The Wagoner’s Lad” with the folkish accent so firmly in control and, just as firmly, the exact harmonic “bending” of every phrase. I’ve admired this quality in Anonymous 4 from the start, and it’s gratifying to hear them carry it intact from one kind of music, across centuries and a wide ocean, to another. Beyond these highfalutin words: This is a wondrous, essential, fabulous collection. If all this talk about the end of the disc era has slowed your collecting zeal, wait out this one final spark of life. After all, these songs were meant to restore the faith.?