So I've Heard

Blackbirds at Dawn

The sun broke through only in the last minutes of this year’s Ojai Festival, embracing the final Bach chorus in that legendary pink twilight that is part of the local legend. This was the 60th, the third under the management of former Clevelander Tom Morris – and it had its share of memorable moments, along with others.

Perhaps it’s time, however, that we stopped living in Ojai’s past, because the element most clearly lacking, at this year’s festival and probably from now on, is that thread of serendipity, mingled with unreality, that winds through every account of Ojai’s history. It is unreal that Stravinsky and Boulez walked the streets of this rural never-never land, that Lawrence Morton and Ernest Fleischmann planned and produced concert programs in a rustic town park with music too demanding even for the boldest Music Center audiences. There was wonderful music at this year’s festival, and there were wonderful performers, but after the concerts you could rush up to the record booth and buy the same music with the same performers (if you got there soon enough), as you might at Disney Hall. I was often delighted by what I heard – it couldn’t have been otherwise; who could miss, in the presence of Dawn Upshaw’s singing, or Osvaldo Golijov’s music? – but I missed being startled, as I had been in memorable years past by Thomas Adès and Magnus Lindberg and (repeatedly) by Pierre Boulez. I take it as ominous that I couldn’t find a single thing to buy at Bart’s Books, and that the new management at Antonio’s has installed outdoor live music so loud that you have to flee to the dreary indoors to enjoy the still-excellent chiles relleños.

The festival’s opening program was denied the local press by the conflicting postponed opening of the L.A. Opera’s Grendel, on whose merits I will withhold further comment. One part of the Ojai opener I had seen before to great delight, a mingling of the inscrutable creative talents of the composer Conlon Nancarrow and the German-born, Seattle-based gadget-sculptor Trimpin. Some years ago, Trimpin worked out a way of transforming the rhythmic complexity of Nancarrow’s player-piano rolls to a piston-operated keyboard, and thence to small gadgets to activate various sounding devices. At Telluride, these were wooden shoes going clickety-clack. For Ojai, Trimpin built more complex trumpetlike gadgets that children could work as toys, but which the Nancarrow pieces could also activate gorgeously (or so I judged from a demonstration the day after the concert). Trimpin is some kind of cherishable, unique near genius who needs to come among us more often to impart his precious twinkle to the contemporary creative process.

From Golijov there was the short opera Ainadamar, which we had here in a poorly staged early version at a “Green Umbrella” in 2004, but which has now been extensively rethought and stands forth as intense, disturbing drama built around the murder by Spanish fascists of the poet García Lorca, through the memoir of the actress who loved him and who speaks now against tyranny. The fusion of nationalities in the tone of Golijov’s music – a mix of the slashing Hispanic and Hebraic, which remain somewhat apart and strike sparks in between – draws an uncanny match from Upshaw: The sweet, angelic Susanna and Barbarina of her early days goes through an amazing transformation in this music; it gets into her blood and into ours.

Two days later, Upshaw returned in Golijov’s Ayre, the wondrous cycle of song-passions gathered from Mediterranean lands at many times in many tongues. Again as at a “Green Umbrella” earlier last season, her companions were the chamber group Eighth Blackbird, but this time much transformed from the mere accompanists of the previous performance. For whatever reason – more careful listening to the singer, or to the intense guitar of Gustavo Santaolalla – the performance took on a luster that the “Umbrella” event had not. For further luster, Upshaw and the group began that memorable Sunday morning with the work that is the disc-mate to Ayre (and which Golijov cites as inspiration for his work), Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs.

There was more: Robert Spano and his Atlanta Symphony slogging through John Adams’ Chamber Symphony, the orchestra’s Chamber Chorus in a dreary program that had no place, and mezzo-soprano Luciana Souza just okay in Falla’s El Amor Brujo.

György Ligeti (1923-2006)

Somehow Ligeti was on my mind all the Ojai weekend. The Salonen performance of his Requiem, from four weeks back, continues to reverberate, of course. The damp weather brought back memories of another summer years ago, the Ardittis performing both Ligeti quartets, the cold mist almost seeming to blend into the swirling, muttering, magical music. Then, on Monday, Ligeti was gone.

Herewith, a pastiche of excerpts from 1993, the last time we met, at a private concert. (The pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard was to play Ligeti’s Piano Etudes, and the conversation grew out of those phenomenal, iconic works. Aimard, the way these things sometimes happen, is next year’s major musician at Ojai.) As best I could, I have left Ligeti’s diction unadorned.

“I didn’t really change my ideas, but I work like somebody in science, when he solves the problem comes a hundred new problems. Calvin Klein. I have a lot of admiration, but Klein developed . . . a certain blue and then he used only this blue. I am the opposite. My ideal is Stravinsky, went from Russian to Pergolesi to Bach to Webern finally. My music has a lot to do with jazz, but is definitely not jazz.

“You know, we have certain drawers. There is a drawer of so-called classical music and jazz is in a different drawer and pop and rock, but there are places where the drawers mix. So I have my love for jazz even I don’t play jazz. When Stravinsky wrote his Piano Rag Music, his ragtime was also very, very deep . . . In fact I dare to say that the real musical style of the 20th century, the real big thing that happened was jazz, this melding of African rhythmic thinking and English, Irish melodies . . . more important, I feel, than many of the deep learned music.

“There are some composers, some very distinguished colleagues, who really use algorithms, calculating methods. I don’t do them. I feel very close to the scientific community, to the computer people, to the artificial-intelligence people. I’m a member of the secret mafia of fractal geometry, of chaotic and dynamic systems and nonlinear equations, but I don’t use them. If a composer pretends that he invented anything, he is a liar. Nobody invented nothing. Everybody is starting from somebody else.”?

A Tradition Upheld

If life followed the standard operatic scenario, the Grendel that ensued on the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stage last week – after the chaos that delayed its opening, cost the L.A. Opera some $300,000 in added expenses on top of the $2.8 million of the original production, and occasioned the flow of perspiration both at the Music Center and at New York’s Lincoln Center (where the work is to be the diadem of next month’s Festival) – should end up as superb musical drama worthy of the majestic complexities of the George Tsypin stage set and the directorial acumen of Julie Taymor, known to have tamed Lion Kings, Flying Dutchmen and Queens of the Night. It does not.

It joins, instead, the gloomy annals of operatic world premieres – four so far – perpetrated by the local forces under the grand delusion that the future of large-scale opera lies in cramming poor music into old outlines. (Don’t worry; the Metropolitan Opera’s record is just as bad.) In the case of the drearily gesturesome Kullervo and the hopelessly second-rate Fantastic Mr. Fox and Nicolas and Alexandra, these were at least the work of operatic professionals. Grendel, however, is the first venture into opera of Elliot Goldenthal, after a well-oiled career in film scoring. Though his musical vocabulary is the kind that goes down well in patriotic oratorios commissioned by suburban philharmonic societies, he is now faced with the matter of creating personalities on the stage in the process of growth. As far as I can tell, after two hearings of his maiden attempt and reams of his orotund proclamations live and in print, I detect no idea in his work of how to join music to character.

He has taken the wonderful Grendel concept, which novelist John Gardner distilled out of the Beowulf epic and endowed with a centuries-spanning personality, and reduced him to growls and howls (which Eric Owens, made up to look like a belligerent potato, delivers far better than they deserve). Librettist J.D. McClatchy, who seems to have cornered the literature-into-libretto market lately (Our Town, Miss Lonelyhearts and Lorin Maazel’s much-clobbered 1984), collaborated with Taymor on the text, which does not confine its violence to the title character, but wanders arrogantly over the subtly lit terrain of Gardner’s fantastic text, which is in its pristine form a delightful read.

The all-knowing (if deliciously cynical) Dragon, for example, who delivers to the young Grendel the wisdom that will enable him to winnow out the matters of true importance in his life, has via Taymor-McClatchy morphed into a kind of Dietrich-plus-Erda vamp. Operatic exigencies, I suppose, demand a woman’s voice somewhere before the end of Act 1, but all this distortion proves is the willingness of today’s ——–
AUTHORs to cast aside yesterday’s integrity, and so it goes. Gardner’s splendid Grendel has, therefore, sadly metamorphosed into artistic grotesquery heaped upon dramatic dishonesty. None of the L.A. Opera’s former fiascoes went that far.

Oh yes, there is that mighty roar by Eric Owens in the title role, truly a spectacular howl for those who seek that manner of operatic thrill. As the Dragon, Denyce Graves manages an impressive vocal range; Laura Claycomb, that marvelous Zerbinetta of two seasons ago, coats her tiny assignment as Queen Wealtheow in tones of pure silver. Come to think of it, I can’t remember an opera, new or old, in which so many excellent singers have been squandered in so many tiny roles. Can it be that Mr. Goldenthal is afraid of singers? The best performance in Grendel is by Desmond Richardson, the Beowulf, who comes to end Grendel’s lifetime of depredations. He dances terrifically and doesn’t sing a note. (Nor does the stageful of clever puppets, of course, without which it wouldn’t be a Taymor show.)

And then there is that set: Tsypin’s monster of a wall, moving this way and that, spectacularly clanking up, down and sidewise, its 26 computers finally brought into sync to afford Owens and a couple of his pals something to climb up and down upon as their imprecations rock the Chandler’s night air (plus two matinees) – shiny on one side to stand for a world under ice, forested on the other to stand for . . . well, forests. At the end of one scene, Mr. Owens is asked to deliver a curtain line that is unique in the annals of opera lyrics, and may be equally so in the annals of instant criticism. The line is “bullshit.”

Mama Knows Best

On the previous night, the company’s La Traviata began not with the familiar party scene but out on the sidewalk under a solitary streetlamp, with streetwalkers plying their usual trade – this during the haunting melancholy of Verdi’s overture. Violetta then arrives on the arm of her swain-of-the-evening, in a snazzy town car – Duesenberg, or some such. Everybody goes inside, which means that the car must make its exit through the ballroom, but never mind. By then you’ve guessed that this is the stagecraft of Mama Domingo, patroness saint of the opera-plot rewrite, and you’d be right.

There isn’t as much wrong with Marta Domingo’s Traviata as with some of her past desecrations (remember La Rondine?), and the general squalor of her production, of which she is both director and designer, is offset by the general excellence of the singing and of the music itself. Her stage sets seem to consist of objects simply dropped at various places: a Deco table and chairs at midstage against some singularly ugly trees for Act 2, a bed downstage in the final scene with a blanket that makes it look as if Violetta is lying in soapsuds. Overall, however, I see no point in any attempt to move this intensely 1850s work, remarkable in its day as an opera set in its own time, out of that time. Every wisp of fragrance in the music, every current in the moral tone of its story, belongs where Verdi – and his inspiring playwright, Alexandre Dumas – set it, and an Art Deco Traviata is just willfully and groundlessly false.

But there are the Violetta of Elizabeth Futral, her pure coloratura tinged with a splendid sense of urgency; the Alfredo of Joseph Calleja, a remarkably convincing dramatic tenor new to these ears; and the Papa Germont of Dwayne Croft, forthright and sympathetic. John Fiore’s musical leadership strikes me more as tidy than inspired, but a strong tidying hand, considering the onstage mess, isn’t such a bad idea.

The Antic Romantic

Concerts of all six of Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos drew capacity, turn-away crowds to Disney Hall last week. Music by Harry Partch, downstairs in the small theater known as REDCAT, likewise, had people begging tickets out on the sidewalk. REDCAT is only a tenth the size of Disney, but I found both events and the crowds they drew – mostly young and marvelously receptive – similarly exhilarating. Each program had to do with a composer, at a certain defiant moment in his career, trying things out.

Anyone who believed, as many did, that Harry Partch’s hypnotic but daffy music would fade from the scene after his death in 1974, and after the weird but fragile instruments he had fashioned for realizing his stratospheric creative visions had gone under lock and key, had reckoned without the innate magic of his work, and the zeal of his believers. John Schneider – musician, KPFK program host and prime mover – has seen to the duplication of the prototype instruments, with the blessing of the Partch trustees. Nine of these replications, whose originals Partch built from 1930 to 1950, now form the ensemble that calls itself, simply, Partch; its weird and wonderful sonorities, truly unlike anything else on Earth or any neighboring celestial body, filled the air at REDCAT most enchantingly. Marvelous to watch and to hear, the physical beauty of their structure and the haunting resonance of their sounds, as they wandered among the labyrinthine designs of Partch’s 43-note octaves and the vagaries of their percussive adventures, re-created the living experience as it was when Partch and his gang were among us. Last week’s players, including such CalArts stalwarts as David Johnson and Vicki Ray, plus of course Schneider himself, helped reinforce the links with the past. A group of latter-day CalArts dancers, alas, merely contributed clutter.

I don’t know whether any of Partch’s music counts as “great” as we music critics like to define it. Nowadays we have learned to live comfortably in the spaces between the notes of the C-major scale; we know the sounds of gamelan, of medieval chant in authentic tunings, of synthesizers large and small. The shock value that I remember from my early Partch encounters has diminished; the beauty remains, but sometimes wears thin. The best of Partch lies in its power to evoke visual counterparts, and a DVD just out on Innova includes the dance-drama Delusion of the Fury, as staged at UCLA in 1969, which really does match sight to sound. The fearless arts patron Betty Freeman financed that production, and she also produced a film on Partch, at work on his The Dreamer that Remains, that never once attempts to state a case for his possible sanity. That cherishable half-hour’s worth of free fall is also on the DVD.

There were small pieces on the Partch program, too, and they revealed a gentler side not often found in his rowdier music. Several were songs, nicely sung by Schneider, to poetry by Ella Young, a dear lady who deserves to be remembered. Celtic by birth, she settled up near Big Sur and was widely known for her ability to talk with trees. I read her children’s books when young, and read them still.

That’s Entertainment

A night with all six “Brandenburgs,” I once wrote, is like having a whole box of Godiva chocolates to yourself. Now I am under doctor’s orders to entertain less caloric daydreams. Whatever the simile, the entire series – at one sitting or singly – constitutes an absorbing study of a musical mind in action: a problem conceived; a problem partitioned into six entirely separate modes of beginning and ending, traversing entirely different landscapes en route; a problem magically resolved with six different applications of creative genius.

Here is a composer at 35, still upwardly mobile in acquiring artistic command, at a time when composing for orchestras or solo instruments was still a new and untried art – and he flings forth these six killer essays in instrumental usage, which, for all he knew, were beyond the technical skill of any players of his time. Moreover, their artistic demands were rather heady stuff for the time as well. Try those wrenching dissonances in the slow movement of No. 1, for example; people weren’t whistling that kind of thing on the streets back in 1720. What other composer of the time would have dreamed of joining the soft politeness of flute, oboe and small violin to the boisterous assertiveness of a solo high trumpet – and turned the result into the irresistible proclamation of sheer exuberance that constitutes No. 2? Or conceived the dark-hued meditations of low-strings-only that cause No. 6 to stand apart?

Giovanni Antonini, whose ensemble Giardino Armonico has been the commendable background for Cecilia Bartoli’s uncommonly adventurous recital programs in recent years, led the properly small group of Philharmonic players, and tootled along with Inga Funck as the two-recorder contingent in the Fourth Concerto. (Put two recorders together, by the way – any two recorders – and the harmony begins to verge on Harry Partch; ever notice?) The performances under Antonini were of the contemporary almost-authentic style that seems to have become the proper stylistic approach, at least when old music takes place in as contemporary a setting as Disney: no more than 18 string players in the supporting orchestra strings, playing with just enough vibrato to make them audible but no more, and with tempos decently crisp, but with a genial slowdown to round off the cadences.

Among the visiting soloists were David Washburn of the L.A. Chamber Orchestra, who stole the Second Brandenburg with his note-perfect high-trumpet acrobatics, and Lucinda Carver of the L.A. Mozart Orchestra of fond memory, whose support at the harpsichord was solid in all six works, and whose cadenzas in No. 5 bore witness that in this remarkable work the whole notion of the solo keyboard concerto was born. Without the Bach Five, in other words, we’d never have had a Rach Three. Forgiveness is in order.

Wanderings

Claude Vivier was born in Montreal in 1948 to anonymous parents, raised in an orphanage and then by foster parents named Vivier. Honored eventually as a brilliant if disturbing composer, he ended up in Paris, where, at 34, he was stabbed to death in his apartment by a young man he had picked up in a bar. On his worktable there was found a completed manuscript, a cantata for voices and orchestra whose narrator tells of cruising a young man who then stabs him to death; the piece ends with the same sudden shock, and then silence, that took place in Vivier’s room. In the hourlong documentary that is part of Dreams of a Marco Polo, a new two-disc DVD produced by Opus Arte and distributed here by Naxos, a Canadian friend of Vivier’s reads some of the composer’s last letters, which talk of suicide in the most haunting way; there are also hints that another project, which he never began, was to be a dramatic work in which the despairing Tchaikovsky, naked and in full acceptance of his homosexuality, confronts the ways of taking his own life. The DVD set – discs and cover alike – is all in black, as it should be.

In 1971, at 23, Vivier had attracted good notices in Canada, and was sent to Europe on a stipend. There he joined the circle around Karlheinz Stockhausen (who, the story goes, was repelled by the stink of his ancient sheepskin jacket – see photo) and developed his own powerful insights into music as ritual, music as a function of color, music saturated with the scents and the sense of the East. By the time of his death, his praise had been sung by György Ligeti and by the enterprising leadership of the Netherlands Opera. The 150 minutes of Vivier’s music that fills out this extraordinary DVD set has been pieced together by the Dutch conductor Reinbert de Leeuw (who brought us Louis Andriessen’s music during the Minimalist Jukebox, and who becomes a compelling, wise presence as video host) and the Netherlands Opera’s Pierre Audi. Powerful, insinuating, drenched in a restless passion, it is by some distance the strongest music by a Canadian composer I have ever heard, the first I have heard that stands absolutely free from the shadow of that country’s southern neighbor.

Overall, the sequence has been given the name Dreams of a Marco Polo, assuming Vivier himself as the self-proclaimed restless wanderer through many worlds. It begins with his short opera Kopernikus, subtitled “a ritual opera of death,” which involves not so much the medieval scientist as it does real and mythical figures (Lewis Carroll, Merlin, Tristan . . .) around whom dazzling, blinding light images take shape. Into a “Marco Polo” collage several of Vivier’s shorter works have been blended, including Lonely Child, achingly sad evocations of a neglected childhood, set for soprano and ethereal strings. The sense of suffering builds; the final work is the piece on the table in the fateful room. “Do you believe,” the chorus intones, “in the immortality of the soul,” with that “immortality” in German – “unSTERBlichkeit” – itself like a dagger’s thrust. I find a comparable shock, actually, in the impact of this whole astonishing program.

Maestro, by the Pound

On the matter of astonishment, perhaps of shock, this would be a good time to tell you about Maestro. Let me start with the asking price: $4,975 – five grand, minus carfare. This is what you get. Maestro itself is a device for playing music, quite a lot of music in fact, which has been loaded into it in the form of the Cornerstone Collection. (Like your computer full of iTunes, in other words, except that the Cornerstone Collection is very, very big and you get it all at once.) If you’ve never had a smidge of classical music in your house, or anything more recent than a wind-up Victrola, this might be the way to establish yourself suddenly as a highly cultured individual for the whole world to admire.

Except: Just possibly, you might derive some discomfort from the fact that some of the outlay of exquisite discretion and taste that normally goes into the process of collecting – of music or art objects or fine racing horses – has already been done for you by the “classical-music experts” behind the scenes at Maestro headquarters in exotic San Diego. All the music that has been processed and iTuned is from one label – Naxos. Most of it, in fact, is from Naxos’ early years of high-quantity, low-quality catalog building from cheapo Eastern European sources, long discontinued. There’s no choosing your Beethoven symphonies from, say, Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic or Giulini and the home team; it’s the Esterházy Sinfonia for you; no Brendel or Barenboim on the Beethoven Sonatas, only Jenö Jandó; and are you willing to entrust your Mahler experience to the Polish Radio Symphony?

True, there are roadways around the dilemma, but they aren’t simple and they are not well-paved. If you happen to have discs in your own collection that you’d rather have processed to play on Maestro than, say, the Mozart of Barry Wordsworth’s Capella Istropolitana, you can bundle up your own discs, ship them off to Maestro; they’ll process them into their own Web site, return the now-obsolete silvery corpses (which you’re free to use as cocktail coasters) and pipe their content into your gleaming new Maestro player (available in silver or black). That process, by the way, is not cheap; you subscribe to the transfer service at 10 bucks per month, which entitles you to five discs. Oh, and by the way, the service also includes digital copies of the booklets – even librettos! – that you can read on your computer screen as the Maestro chugs along.

Am I the only one who finds this whole business distasteful to the point of upchuck? who’s finding in this whole Maestro presentation a disdain for anyone so minimally sophisticated as to care about the identity of the listening experience? the difference between slovenly performance values and care and pride in the presentation of music? Why have I been doing this for the last 60 or so years? or Ernest Fleischmann? or Esa-Pekka? or the man up the block who makes fine violins? or his wife, who plays chamber music? or the next generation now at work at the Crossroads School or Colburn? Surely not to produce the kibble or the wallpaper that these Maestro people represent, with their absurd promotional jargon – “the most-loved, important, influential music” – and their outrageous prices and their Esterházy Sinfonia. Stop me, somebody; this stuff, and the attitude behind it, has me really angry.

Hybrids

Even in his much-regretted absence, the late Lou Harrison remains a glowing presence. The paltry three concerts of his music in Orange County over the past few days that have been passed off as this year’s Pacific Symphony American Composers “Festival” left much great music unplayed, and wasted time on insignificant works. Even so, there was obvious love behind the planning, and Lou came through loud and clear. Eva Soltes’ documentary film clips showed the 100-year-old gamelan guru Pak Chokro talking about Lou, his eyes filled with reverence. A stageful of kids from the nearby Harvey Mudd College banged away on their gamelan instruments with pride and precision under Lou’s onetime disciple Bill Alves. And you knew some of the reasons for Lou’s importance among us, and why he is so sadly missed.

On the first concert, a bunch of time was squandered on Lou’s old-timey and rather silly piece of pseudo-Satie called Marriage at the Eiffel Tower, even though the astute programmer, Joseph Horowitz, had bothered to resurrect tapes of the narrations from a previous performance, delivered in the twee, buttery tones of Virgil Thomson and Lou himself. You could wish that conductor Carl St. Clair had instead been up to one of Lou’s big symphonies. We used to hear these great, garrulous (and therefore very Lou-like) works regularly when Lou was around to run his own festivals at Aptos, and Dennis Russell Davies was around to conduct. Why not now?

“His music was so spare in design as to seem naive,” wrote The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross, “but it was not simple, and he was not a simple man.” Alex’s tribute, dated March 3, 2003, on the occasion of Lou’s death, is brief but speaks all about the man and his music; it’s on Alex’s Web site, www.therestisnoise.com, and it appeared at the time, ironically, when this country had finally become aroused to the significance and stature of Harrison’s music. Lou had died, at 85, on his way to a college festival of his music in Ohio; earlier that year a similar celebration had taken place at Juilliard, a major awakening of New York’s ears to his West Coast-based music. Conductors around the world – America’s Davies, the Netherlands’ Reinbert de Leeuw – have taken up the cause.

“Cherish the hybrids,” Lou used to say, and say again as a mantra, “they’re all we’ve got.” His early years saw a search for ingredients for the ideal mix: a dash of Schoenberg here, a soupçon of Satie there. Gradually we sense an epiphany, the emergence of a musical language that is Lou Harrison’s and no one else’s. The great Double Concerto of 1981 – an old friend, actually, with recent performances by Xtet at LACMA resounding in the memory – served to open proceedings last week with exactly the proper calling card. The work is pure mongrel, and wonderful of its kind. The background is, of course, the honeyed thunder of the small gamelan – and that was already a sight, five very undergrad-looking kids whomping away at the devices from a culture half a world and half a millennium away. Against this, the solo instruments play an almost continual rhapsodic line that seems to have both shape and no shape at all. There is other music like this: some Terry Riley perhaps, but there the melodic impetus is more Celtic than Pacific.

It’s probably pointless, however, to seek out resemblances; there are just so many notes in the world, after all. What has happened here, and it is more delightful than anything else, is that Harrison has accomplished an overlay of Western concerto principles onto this alien foundation, made it adhere in some strange and cockeyed way, and turned out something close to a masterpiece. This exhilarating Double Concerto is just that. It’s easy to make the distinction in dealing with new music that diatonic harmonies plus tunes equals conservative, and that abstruse harmonies plus bristling melodic lines equals progressive. But those equations break down constantly in the real world, and they do with Lou.

Sight, Sound, Sanity

Nerve centers in tune with Lou Harrison’s music should throb joyously at the stuff on the walls at Westwood’s Hammer Museum these days (through August 20). The show honors the activity of the Société Anonyme, an “experimental” modern-art museum founded in 1920 whose members included the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Piet Mondrian. The Hammer’s walls fairly vibrate with color: slashing lines, here a dizzying Kandinsky abstract, there a prismatic Klee; over in a corner a 1926 animated cartoon by somebody unpronounceably German making Disney look secondhand.

Twice during the run (last Saturday and on July 15), musical events tie in with the exhibition, and as the ——–
AUTHOR of a book once described as “coffee-table gestalt” (relation of music to visual arts, don’t bother, long out of print), I am always a sucker for this kind of enterprise. Remember Neal Stulberg? Used to conduct the Philharmonic’s young people’s concerts? Last Sunday, Neal and some of his UCLA students performed music by Les Six, the six French composers active and famous right after World War I and, therefore, in time with the art in the Hammer show. The Hammer’s auditorium is a dinky space that looks like a made-over furnace room, but it served the purpose, and the music included a violin sonata and some songs by the Six’s two least-known composers, Germaine Tailleferre and Louis Durey, and a suite of tiny pieces by all six. (The others were Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc and Georges Auric.) Best of all, the entertainment ended with one of the great wacky films of all time, René Clair’s silent Dada epic Entr’acte (1924) with Erik Satie’s score arranged as a piano duet by Milhaud and played by Stulberg and Cha-Lin Liu. Satie himself is one of the characters on the screen – firing a cannon from a Paris rooftop, if you must know.

The Only Other Music

György Ligeti’s Requiem first makes itself known in your lower spine, moves overpoweringly upward and explodes into full awareness. Deep, dark harmonies resound from the low voices in the two interwoven choirs, further colored by the orchestra’s most solemn contingent; they form a dense web whose very lack of compass stops the breath. Now and then a peal of brighter brass shatters the mysterious trombone and bassoon sonorities; the chorus and the two vocal soloists warn of the Day of Wrath. There is no other music quite like this extraordinary summoning from this greatest of living composers – nothing I can name that so totally, so insidiously exerts so firm a hold over a willing listener.

At the 1965 Stockholm premiere, a critic wrote, “For a while, all other music seemed impossible.” I would change the quotation: “All other music but one seemed impossible.” The “other music” that night was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, as it was again at Disney Hall last week, the only “other music” that can stand next to that awesome darkness and gather the strength to begin again. Esa-Pekka Salonen’s performance of that symphony went some distance to reveal, and then to dispel, that darkness.

Some distance, that is. To these ears, Salonen’s conception of this most problematic of the Beethoven Nine suffers from one basic misconception: a tendency to drive emphatically forward toward the big, grandiose choral finale but to devote less weight of expression to the far more complex first movement – which to me is the greatest of all Beethoven’s symphonic movements. Time and again in last week’s performance I waited for a shaping of phrase in the first movement, a recognition of remarkable melodic outgrowth in those irresistible gatherings of strength. It simply did not happen. Someday mastery will come; some of Salonen’s Beethoven in this year’s series has been not only promising but truly remarkable – No. 4, for example – measured against his past performances.

We live in hope. The musician who could re-create the incredible intensity of this imponderable Ligeti masterwork – the violent contrasts, the frenzy and the immobility, the half-hour’s immersion in the workings of sheer genius (drawn from the Philharmonic, the Master Chorale, and vocal soloists Caroline Stein and Jill Grove) – is entitled to a little extra time to work on his Beethoven.

Unsuk Heroes, Reynolds Rap

Ever larger looms the name of Korea’s Unsuk Chin. Rumors persist that her Alice in Wonderland opera, which Kent Nagano conducts in Munich next season, still heads here eventually, as does her fabulous (but murderously difficult) Violin Concerto. Her reputation as a master of musical jokes and wordplay is already known here, and at last week’s Green Umbrella, her Cantatrix Sopranica provided 26 minutes of sheer delirium along those lines. It is a piece for singers (three) about singing: vocalises, language jokes, a delightful dig at Chinese-through-the-nose, some passionate Italianate nonsense. Beyond all that, the piece is wondrously virtuosic: two sopranos and a countertenor in exact coordination through demanding roulades and cadenzas. The music is both enchantingly pretty and wickedly to the point. Sopranos Caroline Stein and Hila Plitmann and countertenor Paul Flight made up the chorus of would-be nightingales; Alexander Mickelthwate conducted.

Sharing the program was Roger Reynolds of UC San Diego, whose Center for Musical Experiment has given us commendable multimedia works in many stripes, some of them grateful to eye and ear. Illusion, alas, proved congenial to neither. Commissioned by a handful of big-name foundations, and given here in its world premiere, the work did serve to illuminate one aspect of Disney Hall I hadn’t noticed before. The sightlines are such that you get a clear view of people walking out early from anywhere in the hall. Mr. Reynolds’ work lasted, I am told, 70 minutes; I joined the procession at minute 51. Salonen conducted, and therefore was stuck with the whole thing.

Illusion purports to tell of the run-up to the Trojan War, with texts adapted from Aeschylus and Euripides, spoken or sung or otherwise hurled at an ensemble of brass, percussion and piano performing rather thuddy music. The multimedia bit has to do with singers and actors (whom I leave unnamed, out of kindness) moving from one music stand to another onstage. At the intermission before the piece, there was a sound installation in the lobby with more of the Reynolds score. Wherever I wandered, however, it was well drowned out by conversation, mostly about the pleasures of the Unsuk Chin piece.

All in a Night’s Work

Life in 2006 is a big, gleaming round of one all-Mozart celebration after the other – as, for example, the one that ended the Jacaranda concert season last weekend. Some of it traced familiar ground: Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the “Exsultate” motet, the Flute and Harp Concerto. You might have dismissed the concerto from your anticipation: No. 299 in the Köchel Catalog, out of 626, means it’s an early work, immature, maybe not worth serious listening. The first movement, up-and-down, tonic-dominant, fits these expectations, except that the Jacaranda people devised a cute cadenza, with quotes from Mozart’s other “flute” work, the “magic” one.

But then came the slow movement, with its soft, tentative first phrases and then, out of nowhere, an episode that soars toward sublimity, a conversation of deep import, compounded of sequences of the most heartbreaking harmonies. Suddenly there is the very young Mozart, baring his own inmost thoughts and engaging ours in the process. Mozart does that to people.

The performers – soprano Maria Lazarova, flutist Pamela Vliek, harpist Maria Casale and the Denali Quartet – represented Jacaranda in full blossom. Like the Monday Evening Concerts of comparable value, the series has been rendered temporarily homeless – not this time out of managerial chicanery, but for repairs to Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian that will take about a year. Next concert: a “Pan-American Marathon” in a Deco setting, November 4 in Barnum Hall at Santa Monica High.

Unfinished but Polished

One question immediately surfaced, as a near-capacity audience cheered itself hoarse at the sublime artistry of Ian Bostridge and Leif Ove Andsnes, and the performers had run out of encores: Why aren’t there more concerts like this? Art-song programs, we are told, draw poorly; solo piano recitals, too, unless they’re performed by under-30 exotics – too much intelligence, too little fun. Here was refutation, a program that seemed to be motivated from first note to last by the love of music and of making music happen. It was planned, furthermore, with an uncommon outlay of imagination, with music by trustworthy composers, to be sure, but works mostly unfamiliar, some of it even mere fragments (more unfinished Schubert to pile onto the one symphony we already know).

And it was all fascinating, rewarding, a generous serving of music-making intelligence that also entailed a deep bow of respect to an obviously grateful audience. At the start there was Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, the first-ever linking by a composer of several songs into a continuous narration, thus the progenitor of song cycles by Schubert and Schumann. Later came a Schubert set, the three “Harper” songs from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, linked not so much by story as by mood. Then came a really fascinating clutch of Schubert bits: songs and piano pieces that Schubert had begun and then set aside unfinished, sometimes right up to the last couple of measures.

Why? The pile of unfinished Schubert lives on to tantalize us: whole movements of symphonies, almost-whole movements that others have completed, reams of songs and other short pieces sometimes simply throbbing with beautiful ideas. Living on the edge, Schubert often may have had to set one project aside for a chance to score a little cash with another. Like any artist, he may have felt that he had painted himself into a corner for reasons only he could recognize. In any case, here was this bag of glistening fragments to light up the Disney Hall stage, and here were these supremely imaginative artists to delight themselves and tantalize us all with a glimpse inside. On his own, Andsnes performed the next-to-last Beethoven piano sonata (Opus 110) with such command of the forward momentum – most of all in the final, ecstatic pages of the concluding fugue – as to make that work, at least this once, seem the greatest of all the “32.” He could, in fact, be right.

. . . And Just Finished (for Now)

At approximately 11 p.m. on May Day, Marino Formenti sat at the piano in the Bing Theater at the County Museum to end his recital – which had begun about four hours before – with Palais de Mari, Morton Feldman’s last work for piano, composed 20 years before. Formenti’s American career had begun on that stage in 2000, in a concert that concluded with a jaw-dropping performance of the Sonata by Jean Barraqué, a work widely regarded as unplayable. Now he was back to usher out the Monday Evening Concerts, the series that had given him and countless other torchbearers for contemporary and other adventurous music their first platform – here in Los Angeles and, in many cases, the world.

Formenti had planned this final concert as an “Homage” to the Monday Evening Concerts, and he offered a full menu: an “hors d’oeuvre” of Ives, Cowell, Schoenberg and the gang; contemporary inscrutables, including Salvatore Sciarrino and a Nam June Paik number that demanded an amplified violin dragged across the concrete floor. For dessert, there was a clutch of Boulez’s Notations and an elegant jazzy bit by the MEC’s late mastermind, Dorrance Stalvey. The smiling countenances of John Cage and Igor Stravinsky hovered close overhead.

Feldman’s exquisite half-hour of rippling near silences filled the hall like a benevolent emanation. Formenti had invited anyone who wanted to, to come onstage, sit on a chair or spread across the floor, to hang out at this ludicrously unnecessary event, suspending a series that had begun on a Silver Lake rooftop in 1939 and gone far to establish this city as a firm mover of serious musical creativity. The Monday Evening Concerts (which began as “Evenings on the Roof”) have been obliged to move before. Already a committee to assure their continuance has scheduled concerts in Zipper Concert Hall downtown on February 19, March 19 and April 16, 2007; one of those concerts will be curated by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Stay tuned.

Notes in Transit

In New York last week, I thoroughly enjoyed the newly revised Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim’s razor-edge intensity greatly sharpened by the staging, in which cast principals also serve as orchestra. Patti LuPone’s Mrs. Lovett is so vivid and original a creation that I can finally forgive her Evita; Michael Cerveris, the Sweeney, wipes out any previous image I might have had of that role. Next night, as it happened, I succumbed to friends’ longtime urging and looked in on The Light in the Piazza, which I found admirable for very much the same reasons: a show brought down to manageable size in a kind of chamber-music conception – small pit band, small chorus, splendid sense of ensemble. Adam Guettel’s music is the best new theatrical score I’ve heard since . . . well, since the original Sweeney Todd, and that goes back a long way. I left the theater thinking that if André Previn, for example, had been wiser, this is how he should have set A Streetcar Named Desire: something close to the emotions in the play, rather than all that garbage in the orchestra pit.

And on the subject of garbage, my other night in New ?York was spent at Juilliard, which was celebrating its centennial with a proudly commissioned brand-new opera by an alum: Lowell Liebermann’s misbegotten mishmash raked ?out of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. It’s depressing ?to discover how this kind of cliché-ridden pseudo-modernism can earn the fond embrace of the well-fed trustee, yesterday at the Metropolitan Opera (American Tragedy) or today ?with this piece of claptrap out of Liebermann. It’s enough ?to make you want to head back to Monteverdi and start all over again.

The New Art

Act 2 of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo begins in a sunlit meadow. Orpheus and his pals – nymphs, shepherds, homeless – are celebrating his recent marriage to Euridice. Orpheus, the greatest singer of the day, spins off song after song on his “golden lyre” to the happiest of harmonies. Suddenly a dark figure blots out the sunshine, the harmony turns minor, and the melodies become halting; the Messenger has brought the news of Euridice’s death. All through the history of opera as drama – which can be said to have begun at this moment, at the Gonzaga Palace in Mantua in 1607 – music has served to underline and make thrilling the element of surprise: Susanna’s emergence from the closet in The Marriage of Figaro, Siegmund pulling the sword in Die Walküre; the general unmasking in Falstaff. This is where it happened first, the soft, subtle but unmistakable shift from major to minor harmonies, underscored by a change from high to low instruments, as death’s shadow darkens the stage in the world’s first great opera.

This moment, and the rest of the supreme accomplishments as Monteverdi fashioned his “new art” from the different kinds of musical drama that he and his Renaissance colleagues had already brought to high estate, is brilliantly set forth in Opera’s First Master, an uncommonly well-told accounting of Monteverdi’s operatic legacy by Mark Ringer, a New York director, dramaturge and writer (Amadeus Press – also my publisher – paperback, $29.95). What Mr. Ringer has done here is to create – rare, in my experience – writing about great music so close to the music itself that it can be read almost like a score. There is no jargon here, no Karl Haas/Jim Svejda/Alan Rich gobbledygook.

Read (and, virtually, listen to) this brief sample (I abbreviate slightly): ” ‘Ah, bitter event! Ah, impious and cruel fate!’ sings the Messenger, in a grating minor-key recitative. Incredulous, the tenor Shepherd keeps to his major key when he asks ‘What sounds of mourning perturb this happy day?’ But the setting of the last word, ‘perturba,’ creates a brief dissonance, suggesting the upward inflection of the voice at the end of a question and a sense of foreboding . . .”

Trying to write about any kind of abstraction – music, the visual arts, another writer’s style – should embody the urge to send the reader back to the source; Ringer’s triumph is that I sit here with my desk strewn with Monteverdi: L’Orfeo on a Virgin-Veritas CD with Ian Bostridge, The Return of Ulysses and The Coronation of Poppea in the René Jacobs discs on Harmonia Mundi, half a dozen DVDs. His book brings them marvelously to life, and by doing so re-creates a marvelous era in the arts. Whether I know the work already or not, his kind of writing communicates a deep and honorable appetite for the music under his enthusiastic examination.

The Public Art

L’Orfeo was created for invited guests at a grand palazzo. Three decades later, opera for a ticket-buying public had become a reality, and Monteverdi was in Venice, composing for that public. A compact disc bound into the cover of Ringer’s book provides a pretty good measure of how public taste in opera had developed in the three or more decades between L’Orfeo and the great works that survive from his time as resident composer at the first – or perhaps second – public opera, the Teatro di SS Giovanni e Paolo, which opened in Venice in 1639. Already by then the public taste for fine vocal work was on the rise – not only showoff virtuosity but also deep, expressive singing. From The Return of Ulysses the disc includes Penelope’s great aria of longing with the heartbreaking refrain “Return, oh return, Ulysses.” If you remember the way Frederica von Stade sang it with the Los Angeles Opera a few years back, or hear how Bernarda Fink sings it on this disc (or on the Jacobs recording on Harmonia Mundi whence it comes), you’ll know that, all the way back to 1640, opera had already gained the power to move, and to break, human hearts.

But there is something even more wonderful in Ulysses, and reading Ringer’s excellent description of the very last music makes me want to spend a day or two just running and rerunning that final scene. Ulysses has returned after all those years, killed off all the hangers-on around Penelope’s palace, proved his ownership of the magic bow. Only Penelope still needs convincing that he is he, and all that will work for her is that this new guy will be able to identify the one thing he alone can know: the embroidery pattern on the marital bed she has kept fresh for him. He does.

“The opera ends with a duet by the reunited couple,” Ringer writes. “They sing a gentle minor-key tune with solo and overlapping lines that changes the emotional temperature from extroverted rapture to private, glowing tenderness. Long pent-up emotion seems to bring them to the verge of tears. Newly invigorated, she sings her own lyric: ‘Fly from our breasts, feelings of sadness,’ and now Ulisse sings his refrain with his own slight variant, ‘Si, si, si, core, si, si.’ The opera ends with a powerful affirmation in five bars of unison singing, ‘Si, si, si, core, si, si.’ Just those simple sounds, fading away; nothing more. Name another opera, if you can, that ends so enchantingly.” (I can, one: Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges.)

That final duet is included on the disc (with Christoph Prégardien as Ulysses); there is also a fair sampling of music from The Coronation of Poppea, which is on the L.A. Opera’s docket for next season, in a production from the same Netherlands Opera that sent us the Ulysses a few years back. Meanwhile, as I was saying, you can almost taste this extraordinary repertory in the remarkably vivid, informed – and, I can well imagine, dedicated – writing in this exceptionally valuable book.

John ADAMS: An atomic opera in San Francisco and a multimedia Nativity last month here preserved hopes for classical music’s present and future.

Heinrich BIBER: Madcap violin virtuosity from Germany’s leading composer pre-Bach. In concerts and on disc, he’s taken over on the charts from Vivaldi.

CLEVELAND Orchestra: Dvorák’s rarely heard Fifth Symphony made the orchestra’s Costa Mesa stint especially wonderful.

DORRANCE Stalvey: After leading the distinguished Monday Evening Concerts at LACMA almost single-handedly for 33 years, he died last year. The concerts themselves are also on borrowed time.

ESA-PEKKA Salonen: Musical America puts him on its cover as Musician of the Year. Who are we to differ?

FLICKA Von Stade: A little long in the tooth for Offenbach’s man-eating Duchess at the L.A. Opera? Perhaps, but we love her all the same.

GUSTAVO Dudamel: A 24-year-old Venezuelan fireball of a conductor made his local debut late in the Hollywood Bowl season and wowed us all.

HAYDN‘s String Quartet, Opus 54 No. 2, amazing, adventurous, lit up the Penderecki Quartet’s program ?at LACMA, the kind of music that LACMA now intends ?to ditch.

INDISPENSABLE: Osvaldo Golijov’s Ayre and Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs sung by Dawn Upshaw on DG, with the Andalucian Dogs barking away in the background.

JEFFREY Kahane: At keyboard or on podium, he has brought his L.A. Chamber Orchestra into a golden age, in time to provide ol’ Wolfgang with the ideal birthday gift.

Olga KERN: With piano and TV cameras at the ready, she came to the Bowl and established the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto as the prototypical sex toy.

LORRAINE Hunt LIEBERSON sang her husband Peter’s Neruda Songs with the Philharmonic: beauty of thought matching beauty of artistry.

MARIN Alsop survived the sexist uprising at her newly acquired Baltimore Symphony post; with our own Philharmonic, she led a strong and exceptionally brainy Tchaikovsky Fifth.

NAXOS, NONESUCH: the two labels that sustain hope that classical recording has a continuing sales strength, room for imaginative programming, and perhaps even ?a future.

OJAI‘s programming had some interesting divergences from the Good Old Days, with more (e.g., Golijov’s wonderful opera, newly revised) to come. Stay tuned.

The PHILHARMONIC returned to classical orchestral seating (second violins down front on the right) and much improved its clarity and resonance, especially in 18th-century music.

The Denali QUARTET is the mainstay of the superb Jacaranda series at Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian. It plays Revueltas and Ravel, and raises goose bumps.

Terry RILEY got a messier 70th-birthday concert, at Royce, than the great minimalist deserved, but his own playing and singing gave off the rainbow’s authentic glow.

András SCHIFF played the piano and led the Philharmonic in a warm-hearted and friendly program of small and lesser masterpieces, a most comforting evening.

THOMAS Adés composed a marvelous Piano Quintet, which you can hear on EMI and also hear in person when he comes to the Philharmonic in February.

Frances-Marie UITTI used her double-bow techniques, in a LACMA concert, to turn the throbbing, mystical cello works of Giacinto Scelsi into beauty beyond words.

VIOLETA Urmana, commanding of stature and of voice as well, came as close as humanly possible to endowing Puccini’s Tosca with a semblance of authentic blood and fire.

Schubert’s WINTERREISE underwent the unlikely process of being turned into a stage work; the Long Beach Opera’s production, in a tiny theater, had its own genuine power.

Sheer XTASY: the final trio of Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, staged at the L.A. Opera by Maximilian Schell and conducted by Kent Nagano. Can opera get any better than this? (Probably, but not often.)

YING: The string quartet of that name (four siblings) played short works in a dim sum restaurant as one of the Da Camera Society’s “Historic Sites” concerts, which always match the right sounds to the right place.

ZERO: The future stability of the arts, as foreshadowed by the management of the Los Angeles County Museum, on the West Coast; and by the fall of former-maecenas-turned-money-launderer Alberto Vilar, detained somewhere back East.

Morton Feldman’s music, the perceptive Alex Ross once wrote, works best in isolation. A week in mid-April had begun with splendid public chamber music: the exuberant Cuarteto Latinoamericano in a “Historic Sites” setting, playing music to match in an animated Mexican restaurant in East L.A. It had ended with the vast but intensely private expanse of Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2, in a setting far less appropriate, surrounded by spectators and gallerygoers free to come and go, strolling on hardwood floors nearly as resonant as those at Disney Hall, and with conversations audible near and far including those of children. I knew that the last two hours of the six-hour performance, with the County Museum officially closed and the audience reduced to believers, would turn into the proper setting. Long before those hours, however, I was put sufficiently out of sorts by the affront to Morty Feldman and his dedicated performers – just another LACMA boo-boo – to flee to the refuge of my own DVD player and my own Feldman discs.

Two of “the New York School”‘s signature works deal with time scale: John Cage’s four-minute, 33-second “silence,” which is created anew by the surroundings of each performance, and this huge projection of Feldman’s, which (insofar as human endurance can maintain) draws apart from the surrounding world. Off by itself, it communes with its four dedicated participants to propose, discuss, ponder and then move on to some new idea in this endless progression of the most elemental kinds of music. Sometimes a fragment of melody will immediately unwind into something else very similar; sometimes the next idea will turn into a stern rejection of what has gone before. Sometimes all four instruments will suggest a melodic fragment in four-part, grinding harmony, and you sit up straight as if something from above has hit you hard. In every case, you have the sense of a connected, ongoing process in this work, which moves in definite melodic shapes that are often quite long. This differs from other long Feldman works I know – the four-hour For Philip Guston, for example, which I swam around in for nearly a month while writing the notes for the Bridge recording without ever really discerning a melodic process (not that it mattered).

For the playing of the Flux Quartet (whose name stands in tribute to “Fluxus,” the battlefield of musical renegades in the youth-stirring days of the younger Feldman, the topless Charlotte Moorman, Nam June – shed a tear! – and Yoko), I have nothing but praise mingled with awe. Their insights uncovered the depths of the musician that was Morty Feldman – we also used to talk about Schubert, after all – and I wish I could have shared their stamina.

Mexico’s Cuarteto – three Jewish brothers named Bitrán plus cellist Javier Montiel – celebrated their own mix, starting off with Osvaldo Golijov’s ubiquitous Yiddishbbuk and moving on to indigenous Latin material of slighter but delightful substance. I found Gabriela Lena Frank’s Leyendas particularly congenial: charming dance pieces infused with Andean folk rhythms and imitations of local instrumental colors. There is more than one kind of chamber music in this world, and more than one way to hear it.

Sir Donald Tovey, whose writings decades ago started me on the gloomy career pathway I still tread, wrote with purple eloquence about the C-minor Piano Quartet of Brahms. The work isn’t that often performed nowadays-for reasons not necessarily the fault of Sir Donald or myself – so it seemed proper to look in on last week’s performance by the Philharmonic’s Chamber Music Society, which had the visiting pianist Garrick Ohlsson joined with members of the orchestra’s string section in that very work.

If I should have learned anything since those years of reveling in Toveyesque eloquence, it should be that Brahms in C minor – a piano sonata, a string quartet, a symphony and this piano quartet – spells emotional ruination at the bottom of a mountain of pure ice. What dismal gesticulation! What an infinitude of arm-waving in the desperate search of a melodic shape! In my tattered Tovey I read of “purging through pity and terror,” of an Aristotelian nobility and permanence, of a denial of “cold academicism.” Perhaps I’m holding the book upside down. Mr. Ohlsson, who himself is the size of a couple of Disney Hall’s grand pianos, gave the work the full measure of his convictions; cellist Jonathan Karoly played the gurgling cello solo in the slow movement very nicely, but I found the work empty and cold beyond endurance. My strongest sensation, in fact, was embarrassment at remembering that I had once spent quite a lot of money for the only available recording, with a pianist named Olive Bloom, on some English private label. Last time I looked there were 12.

The Thirteenth of Shostakovich’s String Quartets, also on the program, is yet another of those racked late works that tell us, even more than the symphonies, of some kind of unnamed torment – political? physical? conscience? – that drove the composer’s self-ruinous late years. Here he assigns his outcry to the solo viola, and John Hayhurst’s agonized final terror lingered long in the memory. Along with the cycle of symphonies, the five-year cycle of the Shostakovich String Quartets, which has involved many of the orchestra’s players, has been an enlightening experience as an adjunct to the concerts. I should imagine it has well served the musicians, too.

Garrick Ohlsson was back a couple of days later, looming large over Mendelssohn’s fragile G-minor Piano Concerto, which, truth to tell, might better have profited from somewhat more tinkle than roar. But the roar was also supplied in impressive measure by the Philharmonic and its guest conductor, who used to be more often in our midst, the American-born, Swedish-raised Herbert Blomstedt, who delivered the Fourth Symphony of Anton Bruckner in a beautifully shaped, clear-visioned performance full of the good sense and excellent balance that earned him his staunch following in his San Francisco days. Aside from a passing bad moment among the horns – including a muffed opening note that surely must go into St. Peter’s book – the orchestra rose well to his urging. The sound of Bruckner’s scoring in Disney Hall is one more reason why they didn’t really need that other organ.?