So I've Heard

Backward, Turn Backward

At 14, the precocious Wolfgang Mozart had already turned out 10 symphonies, four operas, three concertos, masses, sonatas, a string quartet and a basket of serenades. At that age, the slowpoke Jay Greenberg has ground out a mere five symphonies, one chamber work and a clutch of overtures. True, his time has also been taken up in newspaper interviews (The New York Times, August 13), in tossing a ball around for the cameras to assert his American-boyishness, and, one assumes, in listening to and jotting down juicy passages from the grand symphonic repertory out of which to build his own oncoming glory.

That commodity is already well-launched. The Times article strikes a proper tone of awe toward a prodigy who demanded his own cello at 3 and invented his own notation system to compose for it. He soaks up the musical world around him, best of all the “Mars” music from Holst’s The Planets and – sure enough – succeeds in regurgitating large clods of his own in that same musical style. Now the world has been endowed with a big chance to meet young Jay Greenberg and his music. On the Sony Classical label, once valuable for bringing us the best experimental and new music, there is now a full hour of Jay Greenberg’s expertly rewriting the mannerisms and footprints of his musical past: a Fifth Symphony and a String Quintet. “For him it is 1904,” marvels one interviewer, “and anything is possible.”

Yes, 1904. Let’s see: The young Rachmaninoff pokes around in the trash bins for discarded melodic gambits. His countryman Rimsky-Korsakov collects bits of tinsel for his hootchy-kootch Oriental numbers. Jolly old Sir Edward Elgar and his dour colleague Jean Sibelius busily stir in the musical equivalent of cornstarch to darken and thicken the orchestration of their sonic landscapes; on the Continent, Max Reger’s fugues and canons accomplish the same. Little do any of these believe that, a century later, an earnest young New York schoolboy will still be constructing overtures and symphonies with the same melodic turgidity, building the same tottering musical structures out of counterpoints that ultimately self-strangle on their own complexity and collapse under the weight of their own fragility.

The shadow of Mozart usually falls across reports of latter-day wonder-kids; it doesn’t in Matthew Gurewitsch’s Times piece on Greenberg, but I’m sure it lurks close at hand. The difference, however, is obvious. Mozart composed in the latest manner of his day, not in the manner of 1904, or whatever its equivalent throwback at the time. “I think originality is way overprized,” says Sam Adler, one of Greenberg’s teachers, in the article. There is nothing wrong, in other words, with expending the cost of a Juilliard education in learning how to recompose Brahms counterpoints in a Sibelius orchestration and, thus, assuring the world that modern music doesn’t matter. “The allegros [in the Greenberg Fifth] have the swashbuckling appeal of movie music,” writes Gurewitsch, and he’s wrong there too. The best movie music these days has moved far ahead of the swashbuckling glop that fills out most of this symphony. Even the clever score of a lightweight movie like Wordplay transcends what “movie music” used to portend. And Crash takes it miles further still; so much for movie music as metaphor. If originality be overprized these days, Sam Adler, so is the blatant practice of helping yourself to other people’s music.

Mahler Mania

Sometimes I start to think that everything at the Hollywood Bowl is just as right as right can be: that the sound quality is fine, that the lights and the teevee are splendid, and that the food guys have been pared down to minimum interference. Then something happens like the occurrence last Thursday, when the Goodyear blimp took to the sky over the Bowl directly at the start of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, and buzzed the space with its racket and its neon signage for nearly half the length of the overture – not a casual passing but a deliberate and extended interference. Even if Goodyear were the only product on the market, I would drive on rims; we are owed an apology.

Edo de Waart was the guest conductor, and Mahler’s First Symphony the evening’s major offering. The Dutch have Mahler in their bones; always have and always will. It may be because of the early friendship between Mahler and Amsterdam’s Willem Mengelberg: a unique matchup between genuinely erratic personalities. It might be something deeper that I won’t try to explain, but in Amsterdam last year for the first time in my life, I felt Mahler’s closeness. I feel it in the first movement – the quirks, the invasions by clouds of cuckoos – and in the third movement with its frenetic klezmer band that comes and goes. Maybe it was my imagination, but I think de Waart agreed with me on these particular quirks. Something in this symphony, with all its rudeness of language and its tendency to chew its cabbage a few extra times – which de Waart nicely controlled by eliminating a couple of repeats – comes very close to a listener’s ear in a properly measured performance. That’s what happened this time around.?

Earthbound

What is there to say about the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto? Its music evokes the full vocabulary of bland, useless adjectives: well-balanced, elegantly detailed, perfect. On my well-stocked shelves of critical writing I find no poisoned pen aimed against the work. Even that teeming battleground, Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective, provides nary a harsh word.

Yet the music disturbs the senses. At the sudden slippage into a minor key in the slow section, you justifiably catch your breath; a dedicated soloist – Hilary Hahn at the Hollywood Bowl last week – has heartfelt confidences to share, and speaks them with suddenly acquired passion. The moment soon passes, but during its time it has elevated the entire work onto a new plane. Our trampled emotions need the sheer giggling delight of Mendelssohn’s last movement – most of all that magical flight of fancy when he blends his fairyland theme with one that is slower, more reflective, and, miraculously, makes the two contrasting tunes stick together – to get things into balance once again.

Hilary Hahn has pushed her way through the hordes of sloe-eyed, cute teenage fiddlers to emerge, at 26, a musician of intelligence and consequence. Her journey has been well managed; you can trace it on discs, from the Bach she performed three years ago with the L.A. Chamber Orchestra to the remarkable intellectual breadth she brought to the grandiloquent sprawl of the Elgar concerto a year later. Splendid teachers have guided her hands in command of her instrument, but you get the feeling that the brain that guides her playing is her own. So was the marvelous sense of conversation she generated with conductor Hugh Wolff and the Philharmonic.

Burnt Offering

Sad the lot of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, which usually turns up at the Bowl on one of the fireworks nights and, thus, is relegated to the position of curtain raiser for the 1812 Overture – a lowliness of stature I would not wish upon any music whatsoever within my cognition. The piece rides around over a mass of self-contradiction; “bad, trivial, common,” raged Nicholas Rubinstein, who two years later sang Tchaikovsky’s praise to the rich Russian widow to gain funding for his Conservatory. Self-contradiction lies at the heart of the work itself: a catchall of disconnections and empty gestures, agreeable moments that never return, other moments that merely kill time, like so much Some Assembly Required that still hasn’t happened.

Why is the work popular? The first of the unassembled parts turned into a pretty pop tune (“Tonight We Love”), and the clangorous chords underlying that tune are a popular notion of what piano virtuosity is supposed to sound like. The slow movement dissolves into the kind of Mendelssohnian scampering that Mendelssohn accomplished far better. Only at the end, in the finger-busting octave passage before the return of the Big Tune (which even Vladimir Horowitz managed to fudge on most of his several recordings, to the delight of those who have lusted after his crown) does it begin to sound like the grand, romantic concerto that the overambitious 34-year-old composer fancied himself to be writing. Yet the work rides on its aura of romantic blather and, I suppose, on its fame: less deservedly so than any work of its proportions I can name.

Yet, as I was saying, it brings on the fireworks in the 1812, and I do not let a Bowl season go by without such adventure. If you don’t know, or care to know, about the Bowl’s fireworks, I cannot be of much help; you have to be there. You have to marvel at the complexity of the structures over the top of the Bowl that spell out building shapes and, on Tchaikovsky night, the flags and insignia of the warring Czarist and Napoleonic forces as they bring about an amazing visual counterpart to Tchaikovsky’s cornball counterpoint. Most of all, you sit back in astonishment at the rhythmic precision of the firings: not only the downbeats but, amazingly enough, the notes in between. “Pyro spectaculars by Souza; Gene Evans, special effects consultant” is all the program tells us about this wizardry; I suspect the emergence of an authentic art form, but maybe it’s just the kid in me.

Afloat Without Conductor

The fountain tricks at intermission at the “Grand Performances” in California Plaza downtown are remarkably similar to the Bowl’s fireworks, if on a more modest level. The air traffic overhead is similar to that at the Bowl but on a more extravagant level; buses and trucks along Grand Avenue add to the obbligato. Once every summer, at least, it is worth enduring the impossibilities of the setting to take in the annual concert by the excellent Mládí Chamber Orchestra, as I did last Saturday. At least my harsh words last year have caused management to abandon the ludicrous practice of a segue from the live music to recorded pop at intermission and at the end. Never doubt the power of the press.

“Mládí” was Janácek’s work, meaning “Youth,” and the small orchestra, which functions without conductor, played with its usual exuberance and clarity: a crisp and clean Prokofiev “Classical” and a suite from the Stravinsky Pulcinella. In between, the evening was rendered divine by Donald Foster’s clarinet in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, where suddenly all other sounds anywhere around seemed suspended and nothing else could matter. That’s Mozart for you.

Obiter dictum: Something else that did matter was the sound of the string bass of Christian McBride, at the Wednesday-night jazz program back at the Bowl, which – I admit with some shame – was the first of the series I’d gotten to this summer. McBride is the Philharmonic’s new creative chair for jazz, and the glory trail of his career runs at least as far back as 1990. What I heard the other night wasn’t merely a matter of my visit to another category. The deep pulse of McBride’s instrument was a bass of richness not before known to me; its infiltration into the sounds of the others in his band – Ron Blake’s saxophones, Terreon Gully’s drums, even Geoffrey Keezer’s keyboards – was something I could easily share. His set was one of three on the program, with Joshua Redman and Herbie Hancock, but the sound that followed me home was the bass of Christian McBride.?

Molar Malaise

There are moments in Hector Berlioz’s music when the harmonies become so clumsy, so befuddled in the sheer ugliness of their sound, that the mere progression around a simple turn of phrase starts to throb like a toothache – especially when, as with mine, the teeth are new. But then you immediately realize – or I do, anyhow – that the downright arrogance of these passages somehow makes up for these lapses of musical common sense, and that Berlioz’s harmonic peccadilloes come from his having studied music on the guitar (rather than a proper concert instrument), where he often was induced to leave out the middle notes of chords and create those empty, rude chordal tones in which the Grand Funeral and Triumphal Symphony, exhumed last week by Bramwell Tovey and the Philharmonic out of the Good Lord knows where, so agonizingly abounds. (To students in search of paradigms for the overstuffed Berlioz style at its most flamboyantly impenetrable, I recommend that last sentence.)

You will journey far through music’s realm before encountering the like of this woolly not-quite-masterwork, which the Philharmonic, along with most of us, encountered for the first time ever at these recent Bowl concerts. As augmented by a local brass contingent from Granada Hills High School and the Pacific Chorale, with the noisemaking forces bolstered by a glorious gadget (bells and other percussion, dolled up with banners and feathers and bearing the grandiose title of Jingling Johnny – or Turkish Crescent or Pavillon Chinois, depending how you shake it), the work turns out a conglomeration of march patterns, a wordless “funeral oration” for solo trombone, and a final “apothéose” of high-level carrying-on, including a choral invocation of “glory and respect to the sublime victims of the Fatherland’s fallen!!!” Apparently, they knew how to do those things pretty well back in 1840, but I’m also willing to bet that an appropriate musical setting of some recent presidential press conferences (your choice) might very well end up sounding like certain passages in Monsieur Berlioz’s Grande Symphonie.

Let me tell you about Bramwell Tovey. He’s a Brit, as you might guess, but no apparent relation to Sir Donald, the eloquent Scotsman who so influenced my own writing back when. He comes out of a Salvation Army background, which explains his larrupin’ success with the massed brass on the Berlioz half of the program, and the genuine audience-reaching charm of his introductory words to this half, which makes him an obvious candidate to replace the about-to-retire John Mauceri as the Bowl’s master-of-all-imagination. Beyond that he has a serious side, as conductor of the Winnipeg Symphony, where he has introduced quite an impressive program of new music to that chill and windswept city. He began last week’s programs (given on both Tuesday and Thursday; I heard the second) with a substantial, tightly controlled Beethoven Fifth: not at all sloppy, as I was told the Tuesday performance had been, but clearheaded and cumulative. It had a single flaw but a common one: a failure to repeat the last-movement exposition, which robs the symphony’s glorious peroration of the last full measure of grandeur.

All Seasons

Having lived through a time – pre-1948, let’s say – when Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons was a musical entity known only to a few desiccated musicologists, I find it somewhat disconcerting, but surely delightful, to encounter the work showing up in a broad repertory, including a salsa version on the Bowl agenda next week and the ring tones of the cell phone of a friend otherwise unreached by the musical attainments of the High Baroque. I wasn’t aware of any potent shock of recognition sweeping through the John Anson Ford Amphitheater last Sunday night as our excellent local ensemble Musica Angelica explored Vivaldi’s landscape in its “normal” scoring, with all its picturesque seductions nicely underlined. None was necessary. Elizabeth Blumenstock’s solo violin contributed the most expressive singing of any musical event I happened upon during the week – operatic cast, solo trombone, whatever. The Angelica ensemble, succumbing to her example, played – well, without belaboring the matter, as angels might. Only a recalcitrant amplification system added a touch of the satanic: Was it needed at all?

For its annual summer-season opera, the Music Academy of the West has a long reputation for coming up with some whiz-bang repertory in performances of comparable quality, to reward the horror of what usually turns out a 90-mile bumper-to-bumper drive into Santa Barbara’s Fiesta Weekend. This year’s opera was Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Reims, and while there are valid reasons for arguing that the work isn’t much of an opera at all, those demurrers become less important once the music starts. The opera dates from 1825, and is basically a bootlicking piece to honor the coronation of France’s Charles X, with a lot of elegant people gathered on their way to the coronation, enduring foul-ups amorous and otherwise, finally deciding that none of them matters and singing to honor the new king. The best of the music – especially a splendid chorus-and-ensemble piece that made up most of Act 2 in the original – later got reused in Rossini’s Le Comte Ory, a far better work. Why didn’t they do that one instead?

That Il Viaggio exists at all today is due to some masterful cobbling activity by the Rossini Foundation, based in Pesaro, the composer’s birthplace, which reassembled the score from scattered manuscripts and produced the famous performance I saw in 1984, under Claudio Abbado with an all-star cast. Brave souls, even of less than all-star quality, have kept the work in circulation since that illustrious resurrection, but the recording of that event remains to shame them all, and so it was last weekend. I heard pretty voices, a lively orchestra under Christopher Larkin, an ensemble cast deployed by director Casey Stangl (honest!) around Allen Moyer’s serviceable but bland stage set in the airless Lobero Theater. I didn’t hear a single trill in proper Rossinian style, or a long and lovely phrase delivered with a sense of line with shading and blossoming and shape. In the audience sat the great Marilyn Horne, who is the Music Academy’s Voice Program director in the tradition of the school’s founding divinities Lotte Lehmann, Martial Singher and Maurice Abravanel. I’m sure she knew how much ground had been covered in presenting this altogether pleasant evening of opera, and how much ground remained to be covered.?

Magnificent Obsession

Those of you who have been following this page for any length of time, and are easily shocked, are advised to direct your gaze elsewhere this week, because my mood, which no amount of medication in my well-stocked cabinet is able to divert, seems irrevocably fastened on an obsession to break out in praise of – if you’re ready – Jean Sibelius. That dour Finn, and his equally dour music, turn up frequently around here as matter for excoriation; so, especially, does his Violin Concerto, dourest of all. Yet that very work was on at the Hollywood Bowl a week ago; I found the performance magnificent, the setting more so, and perhaps the circumstances also contributed. All I know is that it was one of the best events I have experienced at the Bowl, going back to . . . well, how about Giulini and Perlman playing the Brahms Concerto (another work I am sometimes given to deplore) in, I think, 1982.

My box mate at last week’s concert was a smart young writer, the broadening of whose horizons I have made a summer project of my own, and let me state right away that there is no better way to enhance your own involvement with an experience – music, food, a Dodger game – than to go with someone who asks questions and really wants to know. “What is a concerto?” my friend asked at the start, and, boy oh boy, did the answer fall into our laps as if fashioned by the gods. That wispy gray nagging tune for solo violin, not stumbling as it usually does, awash in a thin orchestral gruel, made its way into our awareness this time on a cloud of bird song, the happy populace of Cahuenga Pass making tidy for the night and sharing its magic with the world. What a radiant moment! It seemed to ordain a different way of hearing the entire work – all 30 minutes of up-and-down strained melody following strained melody in no logical sequence, here a cute effect for the bassoons, there a vulgarity for brass – as though, this once, some great and happy intelligence had shaped a design. And that, my friend, is a concerto.

Nikolaj Znaider was the soloist – born in Denmark to Polish-Israeli parentage – and he delivered a phenomenal performance, technically flawless and so splendidly up-front that you stopped listening to technique and began listening for musical matters. From the awesome repertory list in his biography, he apparently knows something about these matters as well, and he’s welcome to play them in our back yard at any time. Sir Andrew Davis, the week’s Philharmonic guest conductor, obviously knows his way around the Sibelius landscape – and also around the ersatz-Sibelius sound of Gustav Holst’s The Planets, which filled in the rest of the program like so much packing straw.

Footloose

Two nights previous, one of the Bowl’s small stock of “Classical Tuesdays” had been squandered on a ragtag dance program: 14 members of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago wandering through Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 and a gathering of single movements by Bach. I must first register my predilections: I object to music being used (as in bad jokes to Mozart’s magisterial symphony) as opposed to danced to (as in Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, which, along with Jerome Robbins’ Goldberg Variations, is the only danced Bach I truly admire). I also object to the kind of disrespect that thinks it’s perfectly swell to take single movements, willy-nilly, out of Bach concertos and keyboard suites and string them together as dance suites. You still hear the music, but the jolt of the segue to the haunting D-minor adagio of the First “Brandenburg” Concerto after parts of the E-flat Cello Suite is something neither Bach nor I should be asked to endure; it stands for a lousy attitude toward the music, especially on one of the few nights in the Bowl season that are supposed to be about music.

You would think, furthermore, that by the third season of those big video screens at the Bowl, they would have begun to make sense. I suspect that there is not as yet anything in the Bowl or the Philharmonic organization like a real production staff in charge of making sense out of all that obviously expensive equipment bunched up at the front of the property: the screens, the speakers, whatever. The sound is greatly improved, by the way. Whatever those big green boxes are down front, they have dealt properly with the ridiculous echo that plagued the orchestral sound in the past couple of years, and the sound from where I sit – about halfway back – is that of an extremely good home hi-fi, and I don’t expect an outdoor installation will ever get better than that.

But the video screens are just plain goddamn wasted. The dancers the other night were mostly dark shadows blended in among the orchestral players, and the coordination – the right player at the right time – is only minimally better than before. And it is absolutely absurd that on a night with singing or speech – the Tosca, the Beethoven Ninth finale and the arias in Amadeus – there are no visual texts. That lack all but concedes the day to the objections to the whole idea of Bowl concerts frequently raised, with what I detect lately as a noticeable crescendo, by my friend and colleague Mark Swed of the Times.

All told, I think I have a better time at the Bowl than Mark does. He complains about the “picnic obsession,” which is a matter to complain about to Patina’s management (or bring your own food, which I do, and which is more fun anyhow). He invokes that old bugbear “musical insignificance,” and he’s dead on; hire Leonard Slatkin if you must, as summertime top conductor, but set him loose on significant American music, which is his specialty, not just the tidbits of his September 12 program. Mark cites the comparison with Tanglewood, where people drive 150 miles (from New York or Boston) to the concerts and therefore know how to behave when they get there. I love Tanglewood too, but also remember a lot of summer music in New York’s Lewisohn Stadium, which was a short subway ride and played to the proles. I loved the sight of 8,700 people at the Bowl earlier last month, listening to Tosca and picking up some fascinating insights from John Mauceri’s spoken lead-ins. One more step, treating the opera as if there were words on a screen to go with the music on the stage, would have raised the whole evening to a state of musical significance. Tosca, which is also no particular love object in my books, deserved that much at least.?

Editor’s note: Alan Rich has been the classical music critic at the L.A. Weekly for the past 15 years. Prior to the Weekly, he wrote for Newsweek and the Herald Examiner and California Magazine and, before that, New York Magazine and the New York Herald Tribune. Now 82, he is a local and national treasure, if we do say so ourselves, and he has a new book, a collection of his criticisms and essays, most of which appeared in these pages. The following is excerpted from a piece written in 1999, a list of 100 works from the 20th century that define their time. The full piece can be viewed online at www.laweekly.com.

No time in recorded history could match the sense of wonderment, the euphoria, the eager curiosity about the future that gripped the Western world right around 1900. The previous couple of decades had given the world the telephone, the light bulb, the phonograph, the automobile, and, a couple of years later, would give it the airplane; these were not merely improvements on things already in existence (as the compact disc might – just might – seem an improvement on the 78-rpm shellac disc, or the Airbus on the DC-3); they added up to an explosive expansion beyond what had previously been assumed the limits of human possibility. All the arts seemed to draw new energy from the spirit of innovation in the land; in the decade and a half from 1900 to the outbreak of World War I, the air crackled with the shock of the new.

Some of the newness may have been the logical consequence of the recent past; the whisperings and half-lights of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande clearly stemmed from the impulses that guided Claude Monet’s brush at his lily pond; Gustav Mahler’s last symphony and the first works of Arnold Schoenberg took the agonized harmonic frustrations of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde onto the concert stage. So, with more surface glitter and less inner substance, did Richard Strauss in his blood-drenched Elektra. Igor Stravinsky’s first ballet scores were recognizably the work of Rimsky-Korsakov’s star pupil. Yet the spirit of the times seemed to drive the new creators hard and fast. The merely two-year stylistic gap between Stravinsky’s Petrushka and his Rite of Spring yawns wider than the 20 between Beethoven’s “Eroica” and his Ninth. So do the two years between Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and the Pierrot Lunaire of his self-anointed apostle, Arnold Schoenberg.

Jump back a few decades – to 1880, say. The European bourgeoisie prospered; the great cities celebrated their grandiosity by building concert halls and opera houses. Virtuosos flourished – sopranos, pianists, conductors. The old masters – Beethoven, Haydn and Bach in monstrously perverse re-orchestrations – held their place; just the opening bars of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, that supremely romantic gesture of bringing the music in gradually as if from a distant cloud, became the gambit for dozens of latter-day rip-offs, some successful. It was taken for granted, however, that by far the majority of the concert and operatic fare was to be music hot off the press. The audience eagerly awaited the latest Brahms symphony, the latest Verdi opera. Richard Wagner died in 1883, and the world awaited with bated breath the emergence of his successor, assuming beyond argument that there would be one.

Around 1900, however, the signs first appeared of a schism between “music” and “new music.” Wagner had implanted some of the attitude with his orotund pronouncements about “the music of the future.” By 1900, too, Europe’s great music-publishing houses had caught up with the past, with complete performing editions of practically every major composer, from Bach to Beethoven and on through Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Berlioz. Performers could, better than before, think in terms of a “repertory” of past masterpieces; audiences, too, developed a fondness for wallowing in the familiar. And so the world at large no longer awaited the next symphony by Mahler or the next string quartet by Debussy with the hunger for newness that had driven taste in, say, 1880. Newness had become newer, and therefore more fearsome, than in the good old days. The impact of Pierrot Lunaire and The Rite of Spring – and the dozens of similar assaults on the musical status quo – drove the wedge.

Music’s world expanded beyond its traditional French/German/Italian/Slavic boundaries in these years. Finland’s Jean Sibelius brought his country its first fame, with music basically rooted in the mainstream past but with at least one splendid work, the bleak, ascetic Fourth Symphony, that does indeed mirror the fog-shrouded bleakness of its native soil. Spain’s Manuel de Falla wrote Spanish-tinged music that went past post-card prettiness in a dark, edgy and wonderfully witty manner. England’s Ralph Vaughan Williams, though defiantly anchored in his country’s ancient musical styles, at least turned out a repertory of symphonies that did not sound fresh off the boat from Germany, as did those of his countryman Elgar. And the United States, whose handful of respectable 19th-century musicians also composed with heavy German accents, produced its first generation of indigenous crackpot/geniuses with the likes of good ol’ boy Charlie Ives, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles and the émigré Edgard Varèse, who proclaimed his Americanness with a wildly dissonant piece called Amériques that had the critics disputing whether it was more descriptive of a zoo or a boiler factory.

The War happened, and then jazz happened, and the timing was just right. Great wars always leave the creative world with the need for a fresh start from some zero point. In the post-WWII decade, the musical world would flop around for a time in desperate search of fresh impetus, adopting and rejecting a variety of artistic possibilities; but in 1918 that impetus had come ready-made, or so it seemed: a fresh, immensely vibrant language, laden with fascinating interconnections to other arts (Cubism, for one), its horizons far out of sight. Like its music, its very name – jazz – was a hybrid of arguable origin. Its vitality was, however, beyond argument. Almost everybody was hooked at first.

Visiting New York, France’s Darius Milhaud raided the shelves of Harlem record shops and returned home to create his ballet nègreThe Creation of the World; Germany’s Paul Hindemith blended the kicky new rhythms into his Bach-inspired chamber concertos; Stravinsky tried his hand at a couple of ragtime pieces, both terrible. Paul Whiteman toured Europe with his big, symphonic jazz band and played George Gershwin’s synthetic Rhapsody in Blue to awestruck crowds – lively stuff, even if neither jazz nor symphony. In Paris, another young innovator, Aaron Copland, was urged by his teacher – the legendary Nadia Boulanger, godmother to a generation of American composers – to use music as a way to define himself and his world. He did so by including, in his delicious, lighthearted Music for the Theater, a generous admixture of the newfangled jazz.

Stravinsky’s revolutionary orchestration in The Rite of Spring gave off all kinds of messages about new ways to make musical sounds. Ten years later, Stravinsky created Les Noces, depicting a Russian folk wedding, with an orchestra consisting of four pianos and a huge battery of percussion; the American George Antheil, in cahoots with the Cubist painter Fernand Léger, did some of the same in his Ballet Mécanique, whose scoring included an airplane propeller. Before either of these, a San Francisco teenager named Henry Cowell astonished audiences with his piano pieces that involved reaching inside the instrument to stroke the strings or whomping down on the keys with a fist or forearm to produce what he called “tone clusters.” Later, Cowell would become mentor and role model to the most carefree and influential of the century’s innovative spirits, the Los Angeles-born John Cage.

If Arnold Schoenber
g had little taste for per
cussion ensembles or airplane propellers, he had his own visions of musical sounds hitherto unheard. Six months before Stravinsky’s bombshell went off in Paris, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire had earned a comparably hostile – if less vociferous – reception in Berlin: music in which a solo voice keened, wailed, howled and whispered poetry about a moonstruck madman, joined by a chamber-music ensemble enhancing the spooky atmosphere with music devoid of any sense of harmonic progression or key. Standing aloof from all the jazzy razzmatazz, Schoenberg sought to codify his wholesale revision of traditional musical values with his “method of composition employing all 12 tones,” which he perennially explained as the logical extension of principles reaching back to Bach. His 1923 Suite for Piano, his first “pure” piece employing all 12 tones in strict serial order, did indeed link hands with Bachian models. But it was Schoenberg’s disciple Alban Berg, in Wozzeck, his harrowing, immensely powerful operatic setting of Georg Büchner’s play, who proved, even more fluently than his teacher, the expressive potential of the Schoenbergian style, moving in and out of 12-tone writing, and also in and out of the Mahlerian shadows, as the moods of the intensely moody story dictated. Just by themselves, The Rite of Spring and Wozzeck were enough to prove that the new century had not lost the ages-old power to produce masterpieces.

Pedophilia in Elysium

In Austria about 20 years ago, I had the rare good fortune to chat with the legendary critic H.H. Stuckenschmidt, shortly before his death. The old man had lived through everything, all the way back to Mahler, and the thing I remember best about his conversation was that the rich, steamy orchestration of his era’s music – the assembled forces of Richard Strauss, the last gasp of German romanticism before Mr. Hitler’s housecleaning – had become part of his own language. We talked in particular about the fate of one composer, who by the early 1980s had become an unknown quantity to most of the musical world: Franz Schreker. Herr Stuckenschmidt had one special word for his music. “Oh yes,” he said, “that is quite remarkable. Full of Klangzauber.”

What a marvelous word, which the Germans make especially so by running its parts together: “soundmagic.” And now that Schreker’s music is working its way back into worldwide attention, some of that Klangzauber is also around again. His opera Die Gezeichneten (“The Branded”) was revived at last year’s Salzburg Festival, and attended by representatives of political factions who would have trampled it in the dust not long before. Now that production, conducted by Kent Nagano and staged by Nikolaus Lehnhoff – he mounted San Francisco’s last Ring – is available on a EuroArts DVD.

Schreker wrote his own libretto, in Vienna in 1915. It tells of a wealthy hunchback on an island called Elysium, off mythical 16th-century Genoa, who hates his appearance but can use his gold to counterbalance awareness of it. He maintains a gold-plated mansion, which Schreker’s orchestra limns in surging orchestral opulence highlighted with bright, jangly percussion; there’s your Klangzauber. A mysterious artist, who paints only hands, persuades him to marry her, but then jilts him for a thug. The hunchback murders his rival. Elsewhere on his island, a gang of the hunchback’s colleagues are running a brothel of underage local girls.

Surrounding the tale is considerable talky-talk on the nature of love and beauty and aesthetic limits; meat on the table in the Vienna of Freud and Hofmannsthal. Schreker’s operas were enormously popular, rivaling those of Richard Strauss up through the 1920s. He never erred, as did his colleagues, by venturing into the morass of dissonance or – horror! – atonality. But he was partly of Jewish extraction, and not given to fighting the good fight. As the Nazis rose to power in the 1920s, he was pushed off the cultural map almost overnight, and a large legacy of intense, powerfully dramatic operas fell with him. One or two have recently been recorded, however; there is a genuine Schreker revival under way. The great success of Die Gezeichneten in this marvelous production under Nagano, with some extravagances in Lehnhoff’s staging that are worthy of the excesses in the plot, will help.

What is really amazing is the richness of just the sound of the music as it roars by. There are touches of this Klangzauber stuff in Strauss: the business around the Silver Rose in Der Rosenkavalier and some lush, gooey moments in Don Juan. But this is baby talk compared to the Schreker sound and the poisoned kiss of the Schreker harmony. He builds huge, thundering orchestral bursts that crest like the frosted waves on a Hiroshige scroll. His gardens of sound can be, of course, dangerous; don’t get too close. But people who like that stuff in Strauss – no thanks – should go double-ape over Schreker.

Later Magic

You cannot talk about soundmagic without also referring to Giacinto Scelsi, the reclusive, indefinable composer who died in Rome in 1988. Indefinable is, I think, the first operative word for this remarkable Italian visionary. The new ECM disc of his music begins by plunging us into a splendid confusion of sound, a dense web concocted by a gathering of 16 string players in an anarchy that, nevertheless, drives obsessively forward. For Scelsi, the normal division of the scale into eight or 12 tones was only a beginning; each note revealed a spectrum beyond. String instruments, therefore, became his chosen medium, and his collaborations late in life with the American-born cellist Frances-Marie Uitti were like a new beginning. Uitti now lives in Amsterdam; in her last concert here, at the start of the final LACMA season, she created an audible rainbow – Klangzauber, indeed – with works of Scelsi that she played with the phenomenal double-bow technique she has devised.

The new disc, Natura Renovatur, athrob with magical sounds, alternates works by Scelsi for Uitti’s solo cello with three of his amazing pieces for “clusters” (more applicable than “ensembles” in this case) of string players; Christoph Poppen conducts the Munich Chamber Orchestra, and perhaps we can allow him back in the house after his misbegotten Morimur expedition of a few years back.

Older Magic

Being given at times to reliving past pleasures (and feeling entitled at my advanced age), I hail the arrival of a couple of discs on the low-priced (Michael) Dutton label, with music and performances I remember with great delight from years long past and rediscover with equal delight today. One is part of a collection called The Art of Constant Lambert, and I’m only sorry that it leaves out that British conductor/composer/sourpuss-critic’s delicious if naive Americana bit The Rio Grande. What it does include, however, is a suite from William Walton’s Façade, delightful little satirical and rhythmic/experimental pieces to Walton’s jazzy score, with Edith Sitwell’s poetry intoned by herself and by Lambert. Walton (in 1929, long before the “Sir”) conducts, and I defy anyone to come under the spell of “We bear velvet cream, green and babyish . . .” and then shake loose.

Another disc includes, among other trinkets, a suite from Scuola di Ballo, notes by Luigi Boccherini in a reorchestration by Jean Françaix (for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo) that sends this most ordinary music skyward. Once you’ve tapped your toes to this wonderfully spirited music, I promise, you’ll never take your Boccherini straight again. The disc also includes about eight minutes – all you need – of Stravinsky’s Tchaikovsky-derived ballet LeBaiser de la Fée, and some charming Chabrier, but it’s the Boccherini that sells it. Antal Dorati is the conductor, and I can’t think of anything better he ever accomplished than this magical quarter-hour.?

Another Opening . . .

I will never tire of writing about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or of encountering new reasons for wanting to. On a benign Tuesday last week, that music – calm and openhanded one moment, furious and mysterious the next, triumphant yet watchful at the end – joined the air traffic and the heavenly bodies over the Hollywood Bowl, sent aloft by a respectful if not exactly eloquent performance by the forces massed, under Leonard Slatkin’s direction, on the stage down below. It was an Occasion (capital O): the Bowl’s first classical concert of the season – not to be confused with “Opening Night,” however, which had taken place some days (or weeks) before. You could tell this one, however, because the dwindling ranks of the classical press – freeloaders all – were beguiled pre-concert by a splendid Patina spread.

It seems to me, however, that a performance of the Ninth Symphony used to be even more of an Event (capital E). I heard it first in Boston in 1942. It was a Special (capital S, okay, let’s drop this) Boston Symphony Pension Fund concert that took up the whole of Easter Sunday afternoon and evening. It began with the “Egmont” Overture, and there was a dinner intermission after the first movement of the symphony. (Imagine!) The concert itself is not very clear in my memory, except for the way Serge Koussevitzky got the cellos and basses to play the “Ode to Joy” theme so softly that you heard it in your chest rather than in your ears, and for the fact that the Ninth Symphony came over to me and my self-important Harvard-freshman friends as some kind of unapproachable relic that one attended with a special brand of awe reserved for this one occasion and spoke about only in hushed tones for weeks afterward.

Times change. The Ninth has been with us twice in recent weeks, and when Esa-Pekka Salonen performed it to end his “Beethoven Unbound” series last May, its impact was much diminished by its proximity on the program to the Ligeti Requiem. A vast and all-encompassing Beethoven Myth began soon after the composer’s death in 1827; no other composer – no other figure in the arts great or small – has bequeathed so rich a fodder to feed that kind of myth and renew its impact over the generations. The letters left behind (the Testament, the Unnamed Beloved), the unresolved family squabbles (the nephew), the mere biographical facts (the fights with landlords, the unpaid bills, the final illness, the funeral orations) . . . all these fuel novels, movie scripts. More than that, they spin off their own stories. They give us the Beethoven cult, not that far removed from the neo-Nazis of A Clockwork Orange. Somewhere in a drawer I think I still have a T-shirt from 1970, the Beethoven Bicentennial, from a Bay Area DJ, with the message that “Beethoven was Black (and Proud).”

This is all sideshow material, however, which the facts of Beethoven’s life supply in profusion. They go nowhere, however, in reaching a reconciliation in words with the miracle that takes place as fragments of musical gesture emerge out of blankness, somehow know to attach like ovarian cells, and form the astonishing bulk out of which the Ninth Symphony is born. This process, furthermore, is being regulated before our wondering ears by an aging, ailing, neurotic dyspeptic who happens, incidentally, to be stone-deaf, who finds from somewhere within his wounded soul the power to lead this material, to shatter it and rebuild it, to transform it at one moment into a song for horns of shivering, distant beauty, and at another into howling, defiant apotheosis. The first movement of the Beethoven Ninth is one, perhaps the foremost, of the Significant Monsters of my musical treasure chest. Hearing it sort of slink by, under a conductor who obviously knows the notes but doesn’t seem to let on that he cares for them, was not my happiest Bowl memory. (Mr. Slatkin did have the good manners, however, to observe all of Beethoven’s called-for repeats in the ensuing scherzo, and in the Eighth Symphony before intermission. Not all Bowl conductors are that considerate.)

Another Show

It’s easy enough to belittle the wonderful Eighth Symphony, especially if it turns up – as it did this time – as curtain raiser (“prep work,” my colleague dubbed it) to the Ninth. The connection is only an accident of numbering; the Sixth is hardly prep work to the Seventh. The individuality of the Eighth lies on every page, but most marvelously in the game-playing with sudden key changes, the quick lunges from a solid footing in one key to somewhere in the middle of next week. These tricks abound in the first movement and finale, and they are great fun.

The last two or three minutes of the work sum up the best that was in Beethoven’s lighter side. An orderly finale has come to its supposed close along the lines of proper classical form. The opening theme had come to an unruly cadence on a C sharp that had no place in the well-behaved key of F major. Now, at what should be the end, Beethoven lands on that C sharp, and it suddenly turns into a skyrocket. Where the music should properly end, it launches into a headlong flight through a sequence of unrelated keys, while the winds in the orchestra seem to surround the process with giggles and laughter. It’s a glorious event that eventually straightens itself out. Besides drawing from Mr. Slatkin an infinitely more spirited and, I dare say, more comprehending reading, the Eighth proved itself, as it always does, very much its own work. Told by some critic that his Eighth Symphony was less a success than the longer, larger-scale Seventh, Beethoven is said to have replied, “That’s because it’s so much better.” I think he was right.?

Only Partly Used

Memories around John Mauceri come to mind as he begins his final season as the Hollywood Bowl’s Man of Much Music. They start back in 1973, as the Yalie with the golden curls, still John MOSS-ery to his classmates, is summoned to Brooklyn Academy by Leonard Bernstein to conduct the revised and much-improved Candide, which Harold Prince’s restaging had rescued from its stodgy beginnings. They advance to 1991, as the self-renamed Maestro mow-CHAY-ry charms an Osaka audience on New Year’s Eve with a few memorized Japanese phrases and a program of spellbinding pops by his brand-new Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, ending with a clap-along “Stars and Stripes Forever.” They swing down to Costa Mesa around the same time, where Wagner-deprived Los Angeles operaphiles have journeyed to hear Mauceri pull the minor-league Opera Pacific through a major-league reading of Die Walküre, and to wonder why operatic conducting of that quality never seemed to happen with our own company. (Those were the days of Peter Hemmings’ leadership, remember, when the podium at Chandler was held down – if that’s the term – by lightweights like Randall Behr and Lawrence Foster. Things are better now.)

Mauceri’s 16 years with the Bowl Orchestra – still, as it always was, an aggregation of top-quality studio freelancers whose roster can change from week to week – has considerably raised the musical stature of the place. For the weekend programs, which have been his principal territory, he has greatly enriched the concept of the light-music concert, especially through his work in what you might call Hollywood musicology. He has exhumed (sometimes literally, from tons of discarded manuscript pages) scores from past films and reconstructed a whole genre of film sound as it was practiced by the generation of big-name composers, most of them Hitler escapees, who flourished here in the days of great studio orchestras. By the standards of the European symphonic repertory – Brahms, Mahler, those guys – the surging hearts-aflame concoctions by the likes of Korngold, Rózsa and Steiner come in a few notches down on the cultural pole. Mauceri’s job was to select the nearly forgotten content from choice pages of what turns out to be a huge amount of music, clean it up some and fling it forth, with some immensely congenial commentary, in the glittering showplace in Cahuenga Pass – a perfect matchup, in case you hadn’t noticed. Bless him for that; he came to us from another world – Yale, New York, several European halls and opera houses – and stayed long enough to confront us with the beauty and, yes, the musical value of some of our own culture. And I will take a large sundae cup of Erich Korngold’s score for Kings Row, or the cello concerto he wrote for Bette Davis’ boyfriend in Deception, over half a dozen Richard Strauss tone poems I could name.

Without saying it in so many words, Mauceri has advanced the notion of film-plus-music as some kind of art form. The Bowl – the marvelous expansion of the perfect movie palace, and so what if there’s no roof – has been his lab. Those wonderful nights when he puts together collections of movie scenes, on the big screens with their music played live, are like panoplies of masterpieces, and Mauceri – in his selections and in the warmth and wisdom of his talks – has always sustained the impression that these unique blendings of sight and sound contain within them the potential of great art. That one facet of his Bowl repertory, I think I will especially miss.

John of Opera

But there is more to Mauceri, and I get the feeling that, either by accident or by design, we have missed out on a portion of his good works. In Andrew Porter’s collected writings – he was critic at The New Yorker before Alex Ross – I read, with pangs of jealousy, accounts of Mauceri conducting Verdi’s La Forza del Destino at the Met and, would you believe, Wagner’s Rienzi in San Antonio. Why not here? It was Mauceri who led the premiere of Andrew Imbrie’s Angle of Repose in San Francisco, the most deserving piece of all the music created for the American Bicentennial. I absorb all this, and get the feeling that we’re letting him leave us with the best of him unexplored. Oh well, he’s only 61, and there’s even a little gold still in those curls.

In Europe, Mauceri’s reputation rests primarily on his operatic conducting: at the Scottish Opera, where Bernstein and Kurt Weill as well as Wagner have figured in his repertory, and in Torino and other major houses on the Continent. In Los Angeles, his operatic stage has been the Bowl, where his performances have been delivered without actual staging but with a remarkable amount of stage verisimilitude even so – helped, of course, by the new video screens, which can be a nuisance in some circumstances but which at least allow us to share the vocal sufferings of heroes and villains. Last year’s opera night consisted of great chunks of Wagner, and as I remember it, the surge and thrust of the performance was quite decently simulated.

Last Sunday there was Puccini’s Tosca, music very much at home, of course, on a stage where movie music sometimes reigns. Mauceri presided, a perfect host; I would entrust any operatic newcomer to his witty, welcoming narration of the goings-on, and the further elucidation of his strong, eloquent performance. The sheer fakery of the music blended nicely with the fakery of the performing circumstances; it was all just perfectly, in a word, swell. Patricia Racette sang the Tosca; the Butterfly in the Robert Wilson staging here earlier this season, she’s a brainy, attractive singer of no particularly ravishing voice but a wide range of usefulness – a latter-day Dorothy Kirsten, say. Frank Porretta, second in a line of adequate tenors of that name, sang the Cavaradossi with its basic brutality intact and nothing more. (Is there anything more?) James Morris, the Wotan-turned-Scarpia, brought a tone of authority, plus a few that sounded rather scraped. The real drama lay, to nobody’s surprise, with Mauceri and – this time – the Philharmonic itself. They deserved each other.?

Please Send No Flowers

Old Sourpuss has been heard from again. “A large chunk of masonry fell off the music industry last week . . .” announced the London-based critic, observer, editor (of a book of mine, even) and all-around gadfly Norman Lebrecht in his Montreal-based La Scena Musicale, “. . . another step towards cultural oblivion.” The “chunk,” as Mr. Lebrecht saw it, was the closing down of classical operations at Warner Classic Recordings; his statement was followed within the week by stern denials. The classics, stated Warner executives in a rebuttal in Playbill Arts, “will remain a key part of the Warner music family.” Warner Classics, it turns out, is being incorporated into Rhino, which has actually managed the label in the U.S. for nearly three years. “We remain committed to classical music,” says a company statement, “and look forward to continuing to pioneer new ways to bring our content to consumers” et cetera, et cetera.

There are two sources of summer-reading diversion you can derive from all this. The one is the news that Mr. Lebrecht is alive, well and moving onward. There is nothing in the tone of his article to surprise his constant readers. His book Who Killed Classical Music? bears the publication date of 1997; both it and classical music are still going strong. Just before the start of this year, he greeted the oncoming Mozart anniversary with a piece titled “Too Much Mozart Makes You Sick,” which advanced the fear that the Salzburg darling would be so overperformed in 2006 that the truly important anniversary – the Shostakovich 100th – would be totally overlooked. “Mozart has nothing to give to mind or spirit in the 21st century,” he fulminated. “Let him rest. Ignore the commercial onslaught. Play the ‘Leningrad’ Symphony. Listen to music that matters.” Beyond that last sickening suggestion, Mr. Lebrecht’s fears have so far gone unrealized; Mozart and Shostakovich have each, by midyear, received a fair share of adulation.

A Different Spin

There is another, more serious misapprehension in Mr. Lebrecht’s observations that just may have eluded him – the assumption that these record producers, whose demise he has come to equate with the collapse of classical music, matter anymore. Last March, when the L.A. Philharmonic made programming history with the “Minimalist Jukebox” programs, which opened new horizons, brought in new, young audiences, and redefined the excitement level possible at a symphonic concert in a large hall, some of these events were recorded for iTunes and, within days, made available on home computers. This was a pioneering venture by the Philharmonic, but only by minutes; the New York Philharmonic was experimenting with the same techniques, with less exciting programs (Mozart, Mr. Lebrecht). The sound quality at home could be superb; even an old duffer like me can twist a couple of cables and run sound from my computer into my stereo.

This old duffer, by the way, has lived through a lot of technology. I worked at a record store in Berkeley when LPs came along. We sold a dinky little player with a metal needle and for every three we sold we had to take back two and the sound was shrill and scratchy, but within a year there were good machines and the London “ffrr” discs, and collections of 78-rpm records were showing up in junk shops. When the CDs arrived, there was a scientist at Caltech who ran demonstrations on the superiority of analog to digital reproduction (as long as you had $50,000 to spend on equipment), but you don’t hear from him anymore.

My friend Adam Crane is the Philharmonic’s director of public relations and communications, and he is one of those people – I am not – who lives in music the way a goldfish lives in water. His goldfish bowl is his iPod, and he fills it constantly from iTunes on the Internet. Wherever he goes – any room in his apartment, his office, his car – he is never far from a port where he can plug in that iPod. I have wall upon wall of CDs; Adam has the same thing in his shirt pocket. Most amazing (so far) is that he has told me that the children of Esa-Pekka Salonen, oldest 14, cannot understand the purpose of Tower Records. They have no conception of a disc.

Right now the market is, let’s say, minimal. The Philharmonic will continue to record its concerts for iTunes – at least four next season – but will also produce discs. (One, the orchestra’s first recordings in Disney – Mussorgsky, Bartók and of course The Rite of Spring– will be out on DG in September.) So will the New York Philharmonic, and rumors abound of other orchestras – Chicago, for one – trying to climb onto one Internet service or another. Problems of copyright clearance and union players will remain. One interesting ramification: If you download a concert from iTunes into your iPod, you can purchase the whole shebang or only selected tracks. In the case of the Beethoven Fifth/Lutoslawski Fourth concert, Adam tells me, the statistics divided evenly among people who bought only the Beethoven, only the Lutoslawski, or the whole concert.

Those faint glimmers can make it look as if the dark demise that Norman Lebrecht has been concocting for classical music is still some distance into the glowing future. The folks at iTunes tell us that the proportion of classical downloaders has now risen to a remarkable 12 percent: four times the best figure compact discs ever attained. I ran into Philharmonic president Deborah Borda in the hallway at Disney. I wondered whether this new technology would someday make coming to concerts at concert halls a waste of time.

“Just the opposite,” she beamed. “You come to Disney, you go home and buy what you’ve just heard. It’ll enhance the concert experience. Not dying . . . thriving!”?

The Mundane

Earlier this month, the Philharmonic ended its Disney Hall season with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, music as familiar to me as the oldest shoe in my closet. I don’t wear that shoe anymore, yet I went to the concert with some eagerness. I thought this elderly and well-worn work might fare interestingly, perhaps even well, in young hands, those of the Philharmonic’s associate conductor, Alexander Mickelthwate – newly upgraded from assistant – and I also thought the rest of the program was sure to make me feel neither elderly nor well-worn. I was right on all counts.

It’s easy enough to groan, “Oh, not Scheherazade again,” although it is not, surprisingly, on this summer’s upcoming Hollywood Bowl program (a first?). You may groan, instead, for “Oh no, not the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto,” or “the Mendelssohn Violin,” and nobody will argue against granting a deserved sabbatical to these and similar portions of the standard Bowl repertory (“slushpump,” as the eloquent Martin Bernheimer used to describe it ad nauseam). Actually, a couple of big novelties in this summer’s programming might be worth your attention even without the catered dinner to help ease them down. One is the grand, noisy but rare Funereal and Triumphal Symphony by Hector Berlioz on August 3; the other I’ll get to in a moment.

Scheherazade, cleanly and forcefully set forth by the orchestra under the excellent Mickelthwate, with Martin Chalifour’s solo violin as narrator, reminded me that I hadn’t listened to it in a very long time – really listened, I mean, to its remarkable orchestral effects. The big ones, the grand clamors of brass and cymbals, are immediately dazzling; so, however, are the small ones, the tiny pinpoints from the piccolos, the muted trumpets, the vast display of pure orchestral iridescence. It made me wonder how many other pieces out of the slushpump I’ve been unjustly only half-hearing lately. I must try to go to the Bowl this summer with cleaner ears. (No promises, of course.)

Starting off the Mickelthwate program were the marvelous Le Boeuf sur le Toit of Darius Milhaud – Charlie Chaplin set to music – and the grand pomposity of Francis Poulenc’s Organ Concerto, to my mind the best of all doomed attempts to combine the grandeur of the pipe organ with orchestral forces (strings and timpani only, wisely, in this case). Vincent Dubois was the organist.

One may suspect, in this slender young German-born conductor, a flair for the rambunctious French between-the-wars repertory; so far he has given us splendid, richly idiomatic readings of two works of Milhaud and now this one of Poulenc. It’s a repertory in danger, far better than the small number of performances nowadays suggests. (When was the last time you let Honegger’s La Danse des Morts make your hair stand on end?) Some of it kicks up heels as delightfully as Le Boeuf sur le Toit, with its deep and saucy obeisances to American ragtime and burlesque. There is also a passionate, oratorical side with religious overtones. Poulenc’s organ concerto knows its place within ecclesiastical architecture – its opening summonings tell us as much – but within that setting it behaves like a piece of music, with a beginning, a climax and a proper end. Its scoring, without winds or brass, holds it apart from the pietistic goo of Saint-Saëns or Strauss. As you’ve suspected, I don’t like organ music much (at least from after 1750); Poulenc’s concerto, that work virtually alone (alongside, perhaps, Lou Harrison’s), keeps the instrument respectable.

The Divine

One small ritual I always carry out when in Washington, D.C., is to visit a small cranny in the Smithsonian Institution’s Folk Art Museum, whose permanent installation bears the title The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. In 1950, William Hampton, a handyman at the museum, was visited by the Virgin Mary and several angels, who commanded him to build a Throne of a grandeur worthy of that title. This he proceeded to do over the next 14 years, assembling found objects (discarded light bulbs, junk of all shapes, a barber’s chair to serve as throne, chandeliers, you-name-it). He covered everything in gold or silver foil and assembled it all on a platform that Smithsonian authorities had allotted him. You stand in front of this assemblage, and it strikes you (or does me, at least) that you are facing the entirety of a man’s life, his hopes, his beliefs. I find my visits to Mr. Hampton’s life enormously moving. You can do it all now on Google, of course, but it’s better if you’re there. There aren’t that many honest things in Washington anymore.

Several writers have created books of poems and essays inspired by William Hampton’s Throne of the Third Heaven, and now there is music. A 32-year-old composer named Jefferson Friedman, born in Swampscott, Massachusetts, has written an orchestral piece bearing the same full title. Leonard Slatkin gave it its premiere with his Washington National Symphony last year, and he has it on a Hollywood Bowl program on September 14. Sharing – let’s say “profaning” – the program is Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Just be careful to park where you can leave at intermission.

Colorblindness: Several friends of the late György Ligeti have questioned my citing his mention of designer Calvin Klein, in my last week’s farewell, as the formulator of a particular shade of blue. That was on the transcript I was given, but a visit to the original tape – which I should have done before – revealed the name as the painter Yves Klein. My apologies all around, to the great spirit of Ligeti, and to Clan Klein.?