So I've Heard

Artist in Resonance

It was a smooth transition, from the substantial wisdom of John Adams’ Harmonielehre, which ended the Minimalist celebration, to the no less imposing substance of the Bach program that ensued. Disney Hall surely needed the two days to air the place out, but you could detect some overlapping echoes. Better yet, the crowd was, once again, near-capacity and, from what I could tell, loving.

All-Bach keyboard programs, live or on disc, tend to favor the Goldberg Variations, with British harpsichordist Richard Egarr’s superb new Harmonia Mundi recording most recently in view. The Partitas, of which Richard Goode played three, contain both sterner and lighter stuff: opening movements that wander rhapsodically and propound powerful, edgy counterpoints that suggest restlessness and the urge to explore far horizons – sounds far beyond your textbook Bach, in other words. Later movements adhere to regular dance patterns most of the time, but also sometimes go afield; an occasional Allemande will turn downright pensive. Of the six works to which Bach attached the term “Partita” (as opposed to “French” or “English Suite”), two – in C minor and E minor – leap far beyond what we expect to hear in everyday Baroque music; they are big, passionate, surprising works, which, properly (i.e., broadly, expansively) performed, run at least half an hour each. That’s the way they came across on Goode’s program – plus a third, in G major, of sunnier outlook – on a full-size piano in a full-size hall to a full-size audience last week.

The emotion this splendid musician revealed in this music rendered moot the usual question of piano versus harpsichord. Since his background includes studies with Rudolf Serkin and Clara Haskil, identification with the high-brain-power musical crowd at the Marlboro Festival, and a much-acclaimed CD box of the Beethoven “32,” the solidity and the eloquence (and, yes, Goode-ness) of Goode’s performance the other night came as little surprise but high pleasure nonetheless.

What works these are! At home I listen often to the wrenching sequence of C-minor harmonies that begins the second of these Partitas. From Trevor Pinnock’s harpsichord I hear a sense of structure, of a piling up from dissonance to unnerving dissonance made the more grating in the sound of the instrument. From Glenn Gould’s piano I hear an awed reconstruction of Bach’s own thought process, the sense of improv re-created anew. From – don’t laugh – the old set of Bach’s Greatest Hits by the original Swingle Singers, I revel in lead singer Christiane Legrand turning the long fugue subject into pure melodic ecstasy. I listened to Richard Goode’s performance the other night with all of these in my memory, and I heard echoes of them all – plus the workings of Goode’s own substantial contemporary intelligence, which drew upon them and from itself the power to turn Bach’s own imaginative patterns into music forthright and moving. That kind of music-making overrides, it seems to me, questions of authenticity and historicity; it was wonderful to hear.

Puttin’ On Airs

Several times this season, at various Southern California venues including Zipper Hall, there have been concerts bearing the grandiose name Camerata Pacifica. Artistic director Adrian Spence shares that grandiosity, greeting audiences at a flowery length that might make such other local greeters as UCLA’s David Sefton seem virtually mute by contrast. “Camerata Pacifica Artists,” so-called in the expensive-looking program – in which the advertising, by the way, is all from Santa Barbara – is actually a sampling of familiar Los Angeles freelancers. The crowd at Zipper last Saturday was fair-sized, about half capacity I’d say; I didn’t recognize more than two or three of the familiar chamber-music crowd. The ones I did recognize told me that they had gotten their tickets free through Goldstar, an online booking service that helps failing concert and theatrical promoters fill houses.

Mr. Spence, who sports a leprechaun’s brogue and plays the flute, the leprechaun’s instrument of seduction, speaks of “emotional programming,” but his program – this year and in next year’s brochure – is full of nice, safe novelties. William Bolcom’s 1976 Piano Quartet was this evening’s highlight, with the Philharmonic’s excellent pianist Joanne Pearce Martin but with string players who didn’t seem very much at home. It’s a wonderful piece, building beautifully from a rather troubled, quiet beginning through a gorgeous outburst of the juicy ragtime-pastiche style of Bolcom’s “Ghost” pieces to a sensational rowdy-dowdy finale; it deserves a rerun with the emotional lights turned higher.

With a top ticket of $40 – if buyers be found – for concerts by locally known personnel, the Camerata Pacifica programs as listed seem rather skimpy. At Jacaranda we never get out before 10:30; Saturday I was home by 9:45. Given the abundance of freelance talent in these parts – and the eagerness you overhear when people talk about the need for more chamber music, more new music or even the steady presence of a group dedicated to keeping the Beethoven quartets alive and well – it’s depressing when a potentially promising project becomes overshadowed with the suspicion of misplaced ego and the wrong leadership wasting time, talent and money. I refer here to my suspicions concerning Adrian Spence (with whom I’ve lunched) and his Camerata Pacifica. I refer also to a certain Peyman Farzinpour, whose “Erato Philharmonia” produced two or three of the most misconceived and, therefore, disastrous musical events on the scene last season, and whose appointment now as some kind of musical director is the latest in this season’s list of egregious errors by our County Art Museum, where the propensity for enacting managerial atrocities seems without bounds.

At Zipper, too – although I keep forgetting to mention it – a charming and communicative pianist named Amy Dissanayake came on from Chicago on March 7 to fill in the wild-card position in this year’s Piano Spheres roster. With her came Chicago music: six Piano Etudes by Augusta Read Thomas attached to descriptive titles – “Cathedral Waterfall,” “Rain at Funeral,” etc. Seven etudes by David Rakowski were more specific: “Repeated-note,” “Etude on Melody and Thick Chords.” I don’t usually expect to get much from the terseness of the piano etude (unless the composer be Ligeti), but these turned out as a pair of valuable, attractive garlands, very nicely put forth. David Rakowski teaches at Brandeis; when last heard from he had run his string of etudes to 70.

Free at Last

And so the stigma has been lifted, and we can sport the mantle of “minimalist” in public without shame. It comes, in fact, in all sizes, shapes and colors. At a symposium on the final day of the Philharmonic’s “Minimalist Jukebox,” which concluded last weekend, the fortissimo guitarist Glenn Branca, whose full-length concert three days before I had forsworn in self-defense, proclaimed himself a “minimalist” in one breath, and named Gustav Mahler as his prime musical influence in the next. Try that on your stereo.

From any point of view, the “Jukebox” was a brave, enterprising, successful event. You can argue, as Philip Glass did when I ran into him in the hall after the final concert, that it was largely a celebration of old music and therefore belonged with festivals of Bach and Mozart. But that leaves out a vital aspect of this latest event: the audience it drew, and the response that aggregation of teens and college kids (plus young-in-heart of other ages as well) provided. Some way must be found to keep this audience – not through contrivance, as with the hokey “First Nights” concoctions, which common sense is finally ending after this season, but with the unencumbered recognition of where genuine adventure lives and pulsates within the musical repertory.

Until this is done, the notion of stigma remains. What was remarkable about these two weeks of concerts was their revelation of so much music that needs to move into the repertory and, by doing so, start to attract that young-spirited crowd that showed up at Disney these past weeks. Example: There was an all-Steve Reich program, three big works – orchestral and Tehillim with singers – that should be lighting up symphonic programs all over the world where Till Eulenspiegel and the 1812 currently add to the clutter. Example: Terry Riley sat behind me on the night when Mark Robson played a small organ piece by Arvo Pärt, and you knew what a wonderful event Terry and his A Rainbow in Curved Air would create on that organ someday, and you knew that he was thinking the same; it should happen. Example: Forty minutes from the Glass Akhnaten was scarcely enough to rekindle memories of his great years; that work (not to mention Einstein on the Beach) should have nuzzled its way onto the operatic roster beside La Traviata years ago. The “Jukebox” was a wonderful teaser; now it’s somebody’s job to stand there and keep pushing the quarters into the slot.

Discoveries

It was both amazing and gratifying, in fact, how much new and undiscovered got threaded among the time-honored minimalist masterworks. Who, for example, had ever heard of Terry Jennings? The opening program, which ended with the wholesale murder of Riley’s iconic In C (by a CalArts ensemble 10 times too large, organized with cue cards instead of allowing the musicians free choice from one element to the next), began with a proper-size CalArts ensemble performing Jennings’ 1960 String Quartet, music of hypnotic silences and near silences, fashioned at 20 by a legendary colleague of Riley and of La Monte Young. Something that made the work even more interesting, if in retrospect, came late in the series, at a Riley celebration at the Getty Center, when the Calder Quartet played a Riley quartet also from 1960, almost a double of the Jennings (in purpose if not in actual sound). These two works of “pure” minimalism, dating from four years before In C, which is generally accorded patrimonial stature for the minimalist movement, seemed to bookend the whole local program in all but name. (La Monte Young, also among the minimalist “fathers” for, among other masterworks, his fortnightlong single-note compositions, declined to participate in the “Jukebox,” musically or personally, for reasons of his own.)

The legend of the 1973 New York audience revolt that greeted Steve Reich’s Four Organs seemed reason enough to schedule the work (for the four members of PianoSpheres, on itty-bitty electronic keyboards), with audience docility a measure of the changing times. That program included its own brand of latter-day chaos in Louis Andriessen’s Worker’s Union, for four banged-upon full-size pianos, again politely if adoringly received. Andriessen, who taught at CalArts in the 1980s and worked out a vivid mix of American minimalism with the theatrical outlooks of Luciano Berio and others, also brought to the mix two great, steamy works: the familiar De Staat (melding some of Plato’s harmonic rules into a political context) and the brand-new Racconto dall’Inferno, a glistening, hellish travelogue made all the more infernal in the gyrations of a captivating, diabolical mezzo-soprano with, or so it seemed, a 7-inch waist, a certain Cristina Zavalloni. Wow.

Decasia drew the event’s smallest crowd; I know it’s available on DVD, but the resonance of Michael Gordon’s score, excellently dispatched by USC musicians, bouncing off Disney’s walls to surround Bill Morrison’s film fantasy, was a whole ‘nother kind of media experience. For me, what it meant was that Gordon’s rich, lush musical score was, in some way, creating the tattered, abstract images of Morrison’s film scraps and turning them into some kind of visual drama beyond anything you see and hear. If you don’t know what this is all about, that must mean you still have Decasia ahead of you, and I envy you that.

By Saturday, the “Minimalist Jukebox” was firmly in John Adams’ hands, conducting a Philharmonic program that included the “pure” minimalism of the Akhnaten excerpts, ended with Adams’ own Harmonielehre and also included, before that, a marvelous talk by Adams, interspersed with musical bits, on his life among the shaping forces of today’s music. These included, to my delight, the electronic wizardry of Mort Subotnick’s early adventures at the Buchla synthesizer, so that I could relive my own hair-raising discovery of The Wild Bull (1967, was it?). Then Adams spoke of something newer and electronic called Aphex Twin, and I felt the little remaining hair rising again. Then on to Harmonielehre, in which, along with the throbbings and repetitive textures and clear-headed tonalities and modulations on the edge of minimalism, there are long, eloquent, sinuous, passionate melodies that grab you by the ears, don’t let go for minutes at a time, and even, perhaps, make you think of Mahler. Try that on your stereo.

Wild Oats

Several minutes into the second act of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, the lovesick adolescent Cherubino sings a song, addressed ostensibly to the Countess Almaviva but really aimed at womanhood in general. “You [plural] who know about love,” he sings, “tell me what’s in my heart.” Nobody in all of music had ever written a melody like this before: its sighing lines, its rising and falling chromatics. Mozart accompanies his Cherubino with a clarinet, the most humanlike sound in his orchestra then as it is today.

At that moment in the opera, the song is also intended, of course, to convey a message to the Countess. At least twice Cherubino’s age, she is not the target of his testosterone – the opera provides us with Barbarina for that – but the idealized Supermom-with-tits of every adolescent’s dream. In the current production at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (through April 15), director Ian Judge has his Countess so undone that by the end of Cherubino’s song, she has removed nearly every stitch of his clothing; only because her servant, Susanna, has tapped her on the shoulder does she remember who and where she is. The Countess – who is otherwise defined in the opera by a final act of forgiveness that becomes the most sublime of all opera’s sublime moments – becomes, in the vision of our misguided local production crew, a sex-mad ninny. (Never mind that Monsieur Beaumarchais, on whose plays the Figaro operas are based, later wrote an untidy sequel in which the Countess does indeed bed down with Cherubino. That’s another play in another time.)

This is a revival of the Figaro of May 2004, with the sex parts tarted up, and with the same curious anachronisms left intact. We first see the Countess on the telephone (to whom?). The hanky-panky in the garden is lit up with modern-looking flashlights, often painful to a watcher’s eyes. Adrianne Pieczonka went a bit flat at the start of the Countess’ “Porgi amor” on opening night but recovered. Barbara Bonney’s Susanna, long overdue, is worth the wait. A tiny bundle of mezzo-soprano named Lucy Schaufer, as Cherubino, steals hearts and scenes alike. Kent Nagano ends five years as the company’s music director with a pacing okay but nothing more. But he has that aforementioned Forgiveness Scene as his farewell music, which, you gotta admit, is a great way to go.

Simon’s Side

In nearly 500 pages of collected criticism (John Simon on Music, 1979-2005, Applause Press, $27.95), Simon manages the name of Mozart only once, and then in the context of John Corigliano’s Mozart-flavored pastiche opera The Ghosts of Versailles. (“I am not a Mozart man,” he confessed without shame in an earlier collection.) Of Beethoven there is no mention. Bach? “I know of no sounds less bearable than those of baroque music,” writes Simon in a review of the marvelous film about baroque music Tous les Matins du Monde: a self-recusing statement, you’d think, but then you don’t know John Simon.

Best remembered for driving his critical juggernaut over the New York theatrical scene (in the pages, until recently, of New York magazine), Simon has also produced enough sharp-edged verbiage on films and classical music – in smaller publications for the most part, and in theatrical playbills – to fill three volumes of selections. Of the three, the choice of material in the music volume is by some distance the most curious. Very little of it relates in any way to the real musical world, or even the unreal world of opera. Not much of it, for that matter, creates any kind of portrait of a writer in his chosen field of art, concerned about that art, in love with its place in the world, willing to do battle with the pluses and minuses within that art. His book fancifully supplements, but surely does not supplant, any other collection of critical writings (including my own due out in June, which full disclosure ordains my mentioning).

Instead, John Simon builds his own world out of inanities and unimportances. Forsaking the masters, he waxes eloquent, page upon page, over the operatic and symphonic heritage of Nino Rota, the polite proprieties of proper Brits Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and Lord Berners, the lightly peppered landscapes of Xavier Montsalvatge, the dense horrors of Belgium’s Joseph Jongen. In one feat akin to the taxidermy of long-dead turkeys, he manages to extract a 10-page essay out of Aulis Sallinen’s Kullervo, that gray-upon-gray venture that our local Opera got snookered into staging in 1992 but which – I had surely thought – had been left to deserved oblivion.

When Simon locks horns with a composer any of us are likely to have heard of, or to care about – Leos Janácek, for one – it is usually with the purpose of launching into a monograph, or several, on the literary figures who served that composer as librettists. When he does take on a genuine musical event – Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at the L.A. Opera, say – you get the impression that he has flown here for the sole and long-nurtured intent of flaying director Peter Sellars alive, at unconscionable length, for the sins of a lifetime. Is there music in this opera? A conductor named Esa-Pekka Salonen? Singers with names? Seek your answers elsewhere.

For the most part, Simon seems content to forsake live music making for the rarities on disc that “cry out for rediscovery” (to whom? and why?). Now and then a taste for provocation rears its powdered head. “Opera attracts the queerest ducks,” he proclaims, and makes no attempt to distance himself from the feathered flock, launching into a deeply devoted probe into the aforementioned Corigliano abomination and an appallingly unfunny interview with a concocted “Tobias Maria Blauschuh,” who intends to stage Faust with Marguerite played by Siamese twins.

For someone who, in our days as New York co-workers, was famous for his volcanic fulminations at the appearance of a single typo in his printed columns, Simon has been the victim of haphazard editing this time around. Page 80 has Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle “having little to do” with the Charles Perrault fairy tale, while Page 229 has it that the opera “derives mostly” from Perrault. Better yet, Page 332 has the French emperor identified as “Napolean” three times in one paragraph. What I wouldn’t give to have witnessed Simon’s discovery of that!

I found the word minimalist once in Simon’s book, accompanied by the epithet cursed. After enduring Terry Riley’s In C, the great public monument of the movement, turned into Joseph Jongen by CalArts forces on the opening night of the Philharmonic’s “Minimalist Jukebox,” I began to edge over to Simon’s side, ever so slightly – just this once.?

Late Night Thoughts

Seven years separated the writing of Mahler’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies; just a week separated their hearings at Disney Hall early this month. Ingo Metzmacher (whose photo appeared in this space last week miscaptioned “Louis Andriessen”; oops) led a performance of the Fifth as hot-blooded and indulgent as Alan Gilbert’s of the Ninth had been taut and controlled the week before. In the case of both conductors, theirs was the proper approach.

The Fifth, I know, is popular; it epitomizes Mahler’s prototypical neurosis. It embodies the Mahler of the Ken Russell movie, grotesque and hair-tearing, as gross an exaggeration of its central character as Amadeus of its. What little there is of genuine beauty is almost immediately betrayed; even the Adagietto, the very pretty slow movement, which every hater of Mahler clings to as the Great Exception, is perverted forthwith as its tunes are made to twist and turn in the ensuing finale. Mahler is said to have written the slow movement as a love note to Alma; it may have worked for her, but it doesn’t for me.

I constantly re-read the late Lewis Thomas’ Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. In 1982, in a world still obsessed with survival possibilities in an atomic age – 40 million? 80 million? – Dr. Thomas’ essential question seems to be whether, after those final notes of Mahler have died away, there is anything more in that world that mere human language can possibly express. I had taken the book down after hearing the Ninth, and it was still on my desk after the Fifth, which is perhaps why that work sounded so small this time.

Orchestral bloat even less admirable was inflicted upon a Royce Hall audience earlier that week by the visiting London Philharmonic Orchestra, with Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä substituting for the ailing Kurt Masur. Word from Minneapolis, where Vänskä has amassed a loyal fan club, made attendance seem worthwhile despite a so-so program and the LPO’s reputation as one of its hometown’s lesser ensembles; alas, disillusion reigned. It set in immediately, as the charming Simple Symphony of Benjamin Britten’s boyhood was buried under the weight of the orchestra’s full string section, which then remained onstage to extend similar burial treatment to an early Mozart symphony. Music, if you can call it that, by Khachaturian and Strauss ensued. Maestro Vänskä’s podium antics are fun to watch, and bear a certain resemblance to musical exuberance in general, if less to that night’s program in particular.

Piano Forte

The news at the keyboard last week was bad, bad, super and super: cancellations by Murray Perahia and Martha Argerich, substitution by Ingrid Fliter, heroism on schedule by Jeffrey Kahane. As stand-in for Argerich, the Philharmonic hit it big in the svelte and elegant form of Argentina’s Ms. Fliter, proclaimed only weeks before winner of the solid-gold ($300,000) Gilmore Piano Award in exotic Kalamazoo. Perhaps Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto isn’t exactly the high-powered vehicle to show off an incoming pianist’s brain or muscle power. (She is also slated to play it at the Hollywood Bowl this summer.) Perhaps Charles Dutoit wasn’t exactly the most attuned conductor to accompany this important debut performance. (The Philharmonic’s Alexander Mickelthwate will do the job at the Bowl.) But young Ms. Fliter managed to charm the Disney audience, and the somewhat simple-minded concerto of Beethoven’s journeyman days as well. She is surely on her way.

Four Mozart piano concertos on a single program: Never mind the toll on Jeffrey Kahane, conducting these works from the piano in a single sitting; the glandular toll on an enthralled audience out front is also something to be taken seriously, something no amount of overpriced coffee or pastry in the Royce Hall lounge can counteract. Imagine, having to deal in a single night with that endless thread of single melody (a.k.a. “Elvira Madigan”) that forms the slow movement of the Concerto K. 467, only moments after that other sublime melodic thread, the clarinet solo in the slow movement of K. 488!

Yet another phenomenal reward of this series (which continues through the Chamber Orchestra’s next season, by the way, eventually including all 23 of Mozart’s actual original concertos) has been the wonders that come to light in the earlier works, before the great breaking-out of expressive mastery upon Mozart’s move to Vienna. An early work in B flat, K. 238, lay delightfully between two giants on last week’s program and gave off its own kinds of charm – most of all in some charming rampaging for horns in the finale. The writing for winds and horns in every one of these concertos, from the beginning, is one of the great joys in Mozart discovery. It is also one of the great strengths of our L.A. Chamber Orchestra.

The Palisades Are Alive

Two nights later, some of those same Chamber Orchestra musicians – notably clarinetist Gary Gray and French hornist Richard Todd – were at it again, making music up in the hills as members of Chamber Music Palisades, now in its ninth season at the attractive (if perhaps overly vibrant) St. Matthew’s Parish. Delores Stevens, pianist, teacher and musical prime mover on at least two coasts, is the series’ co-founder, along with LACO flutist Susan Greenberg. Last week’s program, which drew a near-capacity crowd, consisted of four works for which the overall description of “delicious” would not be excessive. Stevens was at the piano in all four. At intermission, there were cookies and hot apple juice.

Matters got under way with Todd and Stevens at joyous, rambunctious work in Beethoven’s little-known early Horn Sonata. One work was new: Peter Golub’s Threaded Dances, commissioned and played by Susan Greenberg – 10 or so most attractive minutes’ worth of quiet nocturnal music nicely full of California mountainside and fog. The program’s other surprise was the Sextet for piano and winds by Ludwig Thuille, a little-remembered contemporary of, say, Mahler and musically a closer clone of Brahms or, save the mark, the much-maligned Max Reger. Better than any of the above-named, this work showed a nice understanding of when to stop.

Best of all was the final work, the piano-wind Sextet by Francis Poulenc: wit, wisdom, sarcasm, tenderness, sheer delight; worth any drive up mountain roads. Hurrah, Palisades! Where have I been all those nine years??

Red-hot Needles

The scene: a January night in New York’s Carnegie Hall, 1973. The Boston Symphony is in town for one of its hot-ticket subscription nights, but conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is trying something new. This will be an experimental “Spectrum” concert, the ads have announced: Bach, Bartók, Liszt and Steve Reich’s Four Organs. Come as you are. The orchestra will play in shirtsleeves. (Sound familiar? Just like last week’s “casual” Mahler at Disney Hall!)

The Reich begins: four players onstage – including Reich himself and MTT – at four small electronic organs as at rock concerts, plus four players with maracas. After a couple of minutes of the same harmonic progression repeated, repeated, repea . . . the audience begins to stir and exchange unhappy, concerned glances. Some of the crowd are young and casual, but some have subscribed to these Boston Symphony concerts since the Koussevitzky days. The stir grows louder. A woman zooms down the aisle, bangs on the stage with her shoe and achieves instant if anonymous fame. “All right,” she screams, “I’ll confess!”

Four Organs plays out its 16 minutes: a terse progression in which the components of a stated chord undergo a gradual augmentation, and the chord itself, in episodes of a few seconds each, pulls itself apart. Some of the crowd, along with The New York Times‘ Harold C. Schonberg, react as to “red-hot needles inserted under fingernails.” Your humble scribe, wearing the colors of New York magazine, finds it “marvelous, original invention about musical time and rate of change.” At the end, there are boos and assorted vociferations reminiscent of the famous birth pangs of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris 60 years before. It would also be quite a while into the future before a major symphony orchestra might once again hazard to schedule Four Organs – or much more of the substantial musical world that has taken root around the pioneering efforts of Steve Reich and his fellow believers – on a regular program.

This the Los Angeles Philharmonic has done. There are several aspects of “Minimalist Jukebox,” the generous chunk of programming spread across the orchestra’s efforts for the rest of this month, that speak with compelling eloquence of courage, imagination and overriding intelligence. Observers of the endangered classical-music scene might well be moved to take such qualities to heart these days. Whatever their secret sources, our local planners act as if there actually might be a tomorrow, and perhaps a next day, too. More than just a retrospective, “Minimalist Jukebox” celebrates a continuing creative vitality.

Long Gone

“Oh well, minimalism,” says Philip Glass in the latest The Gramophone, “that’s been over for 20 years already.” Listen in on the Philharmonic’s “Jukebox,” and the continuing vitality might astonish even Phil Glass. Minimalism came on the scene as a sorely needed housecleaning. New York when I arrived, circa 1960, was a vast cobweb of compositional academe. Twelve-tone was easy to teach, and the small halls were full of tone rows being passed off as brand-new music. Along came La Monte Young with his two-week-long single-note concerts and violins burned in Bob Rauschenberg’s loft; Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik and the topless cellist what’s-her-name at 5:30 concerts when Carnegie Recital Hall could rent for pennies: This all got people talking and cleared the air. John Cage put on Satie’s Vexations, 14 hours of it, in a downtown theater, and we were ready for In C and, eventually, for Einstein on the Beach. How fresh and alive it all sounded! I witnessed both Einstein performances at the Met in 1976, ducking out occasionally for terrific omelets at a restaurant across the street. When Einstein returned to the Brooklyn Academy in, I think, 1984, I sat through four performances uninterrupted.

Don’t tell me that minimalism is over. I hear this vitality – of notes standing out in clear air, of tonalities cleanly defined as they brush against one another and do battle – in whatever latest music John Adams brings forth, because it’s truly amazing how many ways he has made its basic principles work in how many kinds of music. Steve Reich’s latest works, including the You Are (Variations) he wrote for our Master Chorale, keep coming up with fascinating new ideas on the relationship of the spoken voice and melodic lines, and these relate back to some of his early minimalist phasing works like Come Out. Louis Andriessen, who took the minimalists’ ideas back to Holland after his teaching terms at CalArts in the 1980s, and mixed them in with some European ideas, is bringing some works old and new to the “Jukebox.” (His recent opera, Writing to Vermeer, to a text by Peter Greenaway, is due out soon on Nonesuch. I’ve heard it and it’s fabulous.)

The Neighborhood

The Minimalists arrive at Disney (mostly) in interesting circumstances. For two weeks before, there has been great, lumbering, overwritten Mahler (about which more next week). In the week after, there is not-so-great, horrendously overwritten Rachmaninoff. Nothing could better set off the splendid clarity, the power of this music in which every note will count. (I will except, falling back for the first time on my several decades’ life span, the Glenn Branca concert. I do know my limitations.)

But then there is Figaro, opening next weekend across the street and not to be overlooked at any cost. Talk about making every note count! The curtain goes up. Figaro is measuring space for a marital bed; Susanna is trying on a bonnet and trying to distract him. Each has his/her own music; neither will be distracted until the breakthrough. How do we recognize the breakthrough? Simply because he now sings her music as well, harmonizing in a very pretty duet. Three minutes’ worth of singing, and the power of music to tell its story is forever nailed down.

Or take that moment in Act 2. The Count thinks Cherubino is hiding in the Countess’ closet; so, at the moment, does she. Give me the key, he roars; I am blameless, she dithers. The door opens: not Cherubino but Susanna. The Count is dumbfounded; his music grinds to a halt, rendering him mute. The Countess, backed by Susanna, laughs herself silly. The music tells it all, not a note wasted. The neighborhood around First and Grand is full of great music these next couple of weeks; don’t miss a note.?

Cloud Nine

There is no sound more beautiful in a concert hall than the silence of an audience profoundly moved at the end of a musical experience and held captive by the invitation to share the performer’s trance. For well over a minute at the end of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Alan Gilbert’s raised baton kept the Disney audience in that kind of suspension; the magic of the music flowed without pause from one edge of audibility to the other.

That was as it should be. There is a transcendence in that Mahler moment, a passage from sound to less sound to near-silence to absolute silence, borne onward by the simplest of means – a solo cello, not much more. At the dawn of the 20th century, more was dying out in the musical world than the final note of a sublime work by one great but dying composer. A whole kind of music was dying, an era. Mahler would attempt, but abandon, one more resuscitation, a Tenth Symphony couched as a long personal confessional to his Alma. But the Ninth was his ending, and the great performances – of which last week’s was one – are the ones that allow that process to take place unblemished by personal intrusion. “Look, folks, this is me, MTT, performing the Mahler Ninth,” said Michael Tilson Thomas, seemingly, when he brought his San Francisco Symphony to town a year or so ago. That’s the other way.

This greatest of all Mahler symphonies, composed as the whole realm of the Romantic symphony was passing from currency, is for all its power and its expanse an artwork of great fragility. Four times, over the course of each very long movement, it rises out of banal beginnings to some truly fearsome midpoint, and then subsides. Yet that subsidence at the very end – the cello solo mounting heavenward to end 90 minutes of music that had begun so simply, with a most unpromising “So what?” of an opening tune for the two harps – leaves you drained of breath, in a kind of benign catatonia. No wonder you cannot immediately applaud.

Or couldn’t, at least, as Alan Gilbert – New York-born, 1968, currently busy with two or three major European orchestras – drew the work from Philharmonic players during his one-week guest appearance here. Being merely human, he did not quite return us to the deep, reflective poetry of the early-’80s Giulini performance here that people still talk about in hushed tones (and whose memory I reinforce via Giulini’s Chicago Symphony recording on D.G.), but it was a Mahler Ninth honest and thoroughly respectable, delivered with a beat simple and clear. Tempos were flexible, expressive but not fussed with; everything sang out. For a one-shot guest engagement, you’d think the guy had been conducting that orchestra, in that hall, for weeks. Maybe, someday soon, he should. (He returns for one week next October, with Mozart and Richard Strauss: not enough.)

And Schnittke

We heard quite a lot of Alfred Schnittke’s music when it first burst upon us in the last days of the Soviet cultural standoff. Gidon Kremer played his violin concertos here with the Philharmonic; the Kronos played his quartets; now those excellent musicians have other worlds to conquer. There was some delightful Schnittke here last month, however. The English violinist Daniel Hope came to the L.A. Chamber Orchestra with Schnittke’s Sonata No. 1, which is actually for violin and small orchestra, a delightful, all-over-the-place kind of piece (pure Schnittke, in other words), somewhat Mozart-permeated with some jolly dance stuff at the end that could just as easily pass as a “La Cucaracha” rip-off.

There was more – Schnittke’s 1975 Prelude in Memory of D. Shostakovich, which Joel Pargman and Sarah Thornblade played at last Saturday’s Jacaranda, standing with their violins at opposite sides of Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church. The trick there was that one violinist played the four notes – DS(don’t ask)CH – of Dmitri Shostakovich’s name; the other played the four notes of BACH. Gradually, over the time and space, they merged, thus forming a statement on the shared eminence of both composers: resource and trickery worthy of Schnittke – and worthy also of Jacaranda.

Sharing the Road

If any music on the planet stands as more convincing evidence of the dark side of mortality than Mozart’s Requiem, let it be the Mahler Ninth. I don’t blame the Philharmonic for scheduling those two somber masterworks a week apart; such death-dealing doings were probably merely a matter of guest conductors’ availabilities and not any kind of demonic plotting. It just so happened, however, that those particularly mournful events also served as portals of doom within my own life scape – a dour week that also embraced my rendezvous with dentistry and my run-in with . . . let’s call her Miss Jessica Blue.

The first of these trials cannot in all honesty, however, be ascribed to either Mozart or Mahler; Westside Dental had had me on its appointment books for weeks in advance. Nevertheless, a procedure that requires an active critic to submit in a single sitting to the removal of six of his sharpest fangs – and to the replacement of these instruments of renowned predatory efficiency with a nondescript plastic gadget that looks terrible and tastes even worse – cannot be regarded lightly. Furthermore, the damn thing hurts.

Miss Blue, whose license plates proclaimed that she hails from Ohio, entered my life through a shared desire to occupy simultaneously the same segment of the Santa Monica Freeway: I with Mozart’s accents of mortality still throbbing in my grateful ears, she with heaven-knows-what in hers. We ended up sharing a lot more – names of insurance companies, phone numbers, that sort of thing. I survived unblemished; the tow truck, my violated vehicle ignominiously suspended behind, deposited me at home in full view of the folks next door. I’ve always regarded it as a civic duty to keep my neighborhood entertained; this latest in a string of episodes – which included the building of my second-story add-on, not to mention last summer’s paramedics – nicely fulfilled my responsibility.?

Well-Schooled

Brave and forthright rang the sounds of the Santa Monica High School Symphony; I don’t remember anything quite so ear-shattering in Disney Hall’s two-and-a-half-year history. Near the end of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony, in fact, the guy on cymbals had to duck backstage and replenish his supply with a second set; his big golden platters weren’t the only things worn out that night – all in a good cause, of course.

Santa Monica High (“Samohi” in common parlance) fields a top-notch student orchestra, and has for years. The school’s trophy shelf is well stocked, and it was no idle gesture to bring the orchestra to Disney for one of the “Sounds About Town” programs. Joni Swenson has led the group for four years, and she turned one number on the program – the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony – over to an old-timer she identified as her mentor, Vince Gomez, whose credentials as a founder of student music-making here and abroad make him a virtual Johnny Appleseed of school orchestras.

At Disney, the Samohi contingent delivered loud, robust performances of a Rimsky-Korsakov march, the Tchaikovsky Second, the Mahler movement (smoothly delivered by the string section alone) and Gershwin’s An American in Paris. It was particularly rewarding to hear the bright and ballsy Tchaikovsky, which is unjustly neglected in favor of the later symphonies. (Stravinsky was fond of it; it was one of the few works not written by him that he conducted.) I wonder, however, what value today’s young orchestras derive from the Gershwin piece, which, for all its charm, came across that night as a curio in a bygone language, the newest music on the program and yet the one piece least worth the effort of this excellent, greatly talented ensemble.

Less Well

The USC Thornton Choral Artists, which formed the backdrop for the Requiem at the Philharmonic’s better-late-than-never Mozart observance last week, probably averaged a few years older than the kids of Samohi; yet the sounds I heard from their massed forces, 83 strong, struck me as raw and unbalanced, lacking in vocal maturity. The clash of bright, harsh voices against instruments, especially against the remarkable range of Mozart’s orchestral tone colors in this extraordinary work, I found fatally disturbing. I could only balance my own disappointment, in a performance I had long anticipated,

with what I imagined – from my long-standing regard for conductor Christoph von Dohnányi’s own musical conscience – to be his own as well.

There are emanations from this work that go beyond its hokey accumulated mythology (including the rank absurdity of its treatment in the Peter Shaffer play and film) and the picky-picky discussions over editions and completions. Something happens at the very start – the plangent tones of mournful bass clarinets in darkest purple, the soft golden chords from massed trombones, the outcries from the strings – that never happened before in music, not even on Mozart’s most visionary pages. Where did he stand, at that moment, we ask as our spines shiver at these centuries-deep sounds? Into what chasm did he gaze? The question repeats itself: in the violence of the false cadence that ends the “Kyrie” and, most distressing of all, in the murky, muttered dissonances that lead out of the “Confutatis” and into the “Lacrimosa.”

We don’t need a fraudulent Salieri to guide a grotesquely overblown Mozart past these musical marvels; we do, however, need a chorus to capture their overtones of eternity with singing that is loving and awestruck. This the well-meaning youngsters of USC did not provide the other night. Illness by the scheduled soloist also cost us the Mozart piano concerto that would have properly balanced the program – the last in the series, with its slow movement also of breath-stopping melodic substance. Instead we got an agreeable but more juvenile work – No. 19 in F major, its third appearance here in the past two years – in the agreeable but juvenile hands of somebody-or-other.

Dohnányi has become a valued regular visitor. Under his “classical” hat he gave us Schumann last season, and returns with all the Brahms symphonies next. There’s more than that, however; two weeks ago, there was a beautifully shaped “complete” Firebird (shorn of a few feathers that were easily spared) and a brief, attractively dark and atmospheric piece by Britain’s Harrison Birtwistle, of whom we hear not nearly enough. Cherish this Dohnányi; everybody seems to like him, and with good reason.

Hail, Farewell, Hail

Everybody seemed to like Tom Adès, too. At his final “Green Umbrella” concert last week, there were broad hints dropped that his return next season (when, among other chores, he will look in on a staging at USC of his giddy operatic near-masterpiece Powder Her Face) might be the first in a series. We could do worse, and so could he.

This last concert was one more delightful omnium-gatherum: something very early – his Opus 2 Chamber Symphony – and other works, of later vintage. The Origin of the Harp, a middle-aged work for clarinets, violas, cellos and percussion (no harps), charmed me no end: a muttering, whirling, secretive sort of piece full of color and private jokes. At the end came the new Piano Quintet, which I raved about last fall and will do again anytime: serious, beautifully organized chamber-music writing. Music of dots and dashes – one more set of tiny, quizzical György Kurtág songs lasting little more than a minute and leaving behind disturbing prickles; 12 meditative epigrams by Niccolò Castiglioni – filled out the program, nicely delivered by singers Elizabeth Keusch and Cyndia Sieden (the Ariel of the previous week’s Tempest).

What Adès leaves behind is the memory of an exceptional presence among us, and the awareness it seems to have stirred up in musical circles: the quality of mind that seems to inform his way of composing and the splendid richness of his musical resource. Everybody in the classical crowd reacted to his being here, and talked about it, and this created a kind of vision of what musical life in an active community becomes every time something – or somebody – lively and interesting turns up at its core. We in Los Angeles are uncommonly blessed in this regard.?

Maybe it’s something I ate, or didn’t, but I’ve been feeling unusually good about new music these days, for any number of reasons. The Philharmonic has had Thomas Adès as guest composer/conductor/pianist, and after some concerts there have been crowds – mostly young – pushing backstage to welcome him. Steve Reich’s You Are (Variations), in the new Master Chorale recording on Nonesuch, sounds better every time I play it. The Philharmonic’s new season, which includes a big commissioned work by Kaija Saariaho, is a model of imaginative planning. Osvaldo Golijov’s music conquered on both coasts over the holiday weekend. John Adams keeps at it. It wasn’t long ago that some of the Gloomier Guses among critics were wondering where the Great Ones were. Well, they’re here.

Tom Terrific

Adès began his visit here at the piano in a Chamber Music Society concert that included Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, and that somehow seemed appropriate: one young man’s exuberance in touch with another’s, the one cramming five notes where one might suffice, the other having one helluva good time making it happen. (I seem to have said some of this last September, when the EMI recording appeared. Schubert was one for revisitation.) It has only been a decade since Adès’ arrival on the scene with the explosive ebullience of Asyla and the nose-thumbing exhilaration of Powder Her Face. The catalog of his works over those years is long and impressively varied, but the marvel with Adès – as with Schubert over the same time span – is the ongoing sense of control in every kind of music he has so far essayed, the way high spirits and magnificent purpose manage to interact, the way you always know what is happening.

On his first “big” Philharmonic program, which he conducted, there was his new violin concerto, bearing the title “Concentric Paths,” in a dazzling execution by fellow Brit Anthony Marwood. What grabbed me immediately in this supremely beautiful and original work was its blend of event and process, the charm of melodic invention and the clarity of its unfolding. Much happens; my memories, after a single hearing, center on a slow movement of haunting, quiet beauty, but are tangled with other moonlit memories from Adès’ opera, which shared the program.

Music from The Tempest filled out that evening: Tchaikovsky’s and Sibelius’ orchestral prettifications of negligible worth, but then a marvelous wad of selections from Adès’ great opera, first done at Covent Garden in 2004. Meredith Oakes provided the libretto, a free gloss on the Shakespearean fantasy that moves the Caliban character to center stage and decks him out with music as close to moonlight as mere earthlings can contrive. In the half-hour Suite at Disney, we were denied this character, but were compensated with the opera’s incredible, airborne Ariel music, flying higher than human throat ought to aspire to but reached nevertheless by the high E’s of the awesome Cyndia Sieden; music of wisdom and regret for the Prospero of Simon Keenlyside; and paler but no less haunting moonlight for the young lovers sung by Toby Spence and Patricia Risley.

A few evenings later there was more to admire and ponder, Marwood and Adès in a “Historic Sites” program at the Doheny Mansion: all of Igor Stravinsky’s oeuvre for violin and piano, the music he created or transcribed for his friend violinist Samuel Dushkin – transcriptions of Pulcinella and the Fairy’s Kiss Divertimento, the Duo Concertant and some small pieces. In its own curious way, this was also a memorable concert, music of decidedly unimposing stature made important by the sense of players able to project the message that they, too, were having one helluva good time making it happen.

Go Golijov

Over last weekend, as Lincoln Center’s Osvaldo Golijov festival ended with the glorious cacophony of his La Pasión Según San Marcos, Santa Monica’s Jacaranda didn’t do so badly, either. The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, with which the Kronos Quartet (plus airborne clarinetist David Krakauer) first brought Golijov to our delighted attention in 1994, was the centerpiece of an altogether splendid evening of “Pampas, Tangos, Dreams amp; Prayers” that filled Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church to near capacity. Works by Ginastera and Piazzolla rounded out the program with, of course, a decidedly Argentine accent; the clash between these and the whole panorama of backgrounds and derivations within the one 30-minute Golijov work was one of the concert’s many rewards.

This matter of nationality and accent in music is not easily dealt with, and Golijov, with his mingled background of Jewish, Russian, Latino and, currently, Bostonian, has always been uncommonly successful at drawing upon this and making it work in his music. Isaac the Blind deals primarily, of course, with Yiddish ancient history; the clarinets of several sizes stand in for the geschrei of the traditional klezmer band – and, possibly, of the abandoned Jewish mother. Yet it is more than that; already, in 1993, Golijov had mastered the many strands in his own heritage. Surrounded on the Jacaranda program by the intense Hispanic identity of Alberto Ginastera’s music – a couple of songs and the short, powerful Piano Sonata, which more people should play – it became by far the evening’s richest music. Its multinational spirit was handsomely caught by Jacaranda’s resident Denali Quartet – its own membership of mixed heritage including Jewish, Hispanic and Chinese – plus clarinetist Donald Foster.

Resplendent in shirt of flaming crimson, veteran Argentina-born pianist Eduardo Delgado – currently on faculty at Cal State Fullerton – performed the Ginastera Sonata and several short works; sweet-voiced soprano Maria Lazarova sang a couple of songs; John Walz performed a short work for cello: a long, varied and rewarding program. From Jacaranda’s enlightened planners, we have come to expect no less.?

A Mighty Fortress

Sunday morning in the devout Leipzig of Sebastian Bach, centuries before the Lutherans’ conquest of Minnesota, was an arduous if uplifting experience. The faithful gathered in one of the two main churches, St. Michael or St. Thomas, at 7 a.m. By the time they had, in heart, soul, rump and knees, journeyed past the readings from Scripture, sung along in the day’s chorale plus a few dozen hymns, absorbed the musical wonders of Kapellmeister Bach’s latest cantata and the Sermon – ah, yes, the Sermon, the 1725 forerunner of “News From Lake Wobegon” but without the jokes – the noon hour would have struck. There would be time for socializing, the exchange of the “Grüss Gott” and the week’s gossip, but by then the Sunday Rostbraten und Kartoffeln would be waiting at home.

The nucleus of the Lutheran service was the body of the chorale melodies, collected and codified by the Founders, and assigned to each Sunday of the church year – as the Gregorian melodies were assigned to the Roman year. Like the dozens of other musical craftsmen in the organ lofts of Germany and Northern Europe, Bach had the task of fashioning each week’s music as a paraphrase – a recycling, if you will – of that specific melody, and the miracle is the amazing resource with which he went about his task. His 200 or so surviving cantatas, most of them created during his time as music director for the city of Leipzig, are more than merely a collection of great and beautiful executions of the given task; they represent the outlook of a devout and devoted mind on the nature of faith and its interaction with the nature of artistic expression. (Another 100 or so cantatas, by the way, are noted in catalogs but have yet to be found.)

Sir John Eliot Gardiner was in town recently, primarily to conduct a Mozart concert (which I had to miss due to an exceptionally conflicted weekend, with nothing less than Wagner’s Ring and a new arts center competing for attention), but also to talk about Bach cantatas. In 2000, the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, Sir John had taken his Monteverdi Choir, the small instrumental group called the English Baroque Soloists and a solo vocal group on a “pilgrimage” to perform and record all surviving Bach church cantatas, in churches worldwide chosen for ideal size and sound qualities, and all on the appropriate Sunday in the church calendar. This would mean four or five works on most days: a full-length concert and, better yet, a full CD. Deutsche Grammophon was to release the performances; it issued five discs and backed off from the project, returning the masters to Sir John. Now, with private funding – from a donor list including Alberto Vilar, but we won’t go into that – Sir John has undertaken to release the recordings on his own label, Soli Deo Gloria, which was Bach’s own signature, in handsome two-disc packages distributed by Harmonia Mundi. There will be some 25 in all; there are five so far. Even if you were deaf, you’d want them for Steve McCurry’s haunting cover photographs: faces in Asian villages and monasteries, whose haunting eyes prepare you for the music inside. The music making under Gardiner, with his superbly motivated soloists both vocal and instrumental, somehow goes with this artwork. Even with the tiny and negligible flaws of live performances, I find this a new and deeply satisfying way of listening to Bach.

Soli Deo Gloria

“Whatever your beliefs,” said Sir John, “you have to respond to the irresistible power in this music, of Bach’s ambition to serve a higher power. What is even more remarkable, of course, is the way even his self-doubts come through, the anxieties, the pleading. This is the most human of all Bach’s music, and the most humanistic as well. Probably for that reason, because it is so unlike the standard image – the ‘divine sewing machine’ of the instrumental works, for instance – these cantatas are the least explored of all his works. They are also the music that he was most obviously creating for the future. His sons recognized this. Carl Philipp Emanuel, who moved so far ahead of Sebastian in so much of his own music, listed the cantatas first when he set about cataloging his father’s legacy.

“In later time, too,” Sir John went on, “even in the 19th century, when so much was being reorchestrated and romanticized for Victorian audiences, there were passages in the unadulterated cantatas that were amazing Romantic composers . . .”

“That sequence in Cantata No. 8 . . .” I interrupted.

“Exactly. That passage sounds exactly like Brahms, and Brahms knew it and recognized it. And in No. 27, that opening chorus turns up exactly in the Brahms Requiem: ‘Denn alles Fleisch . . .’ And what is the Brahms Requiem? Music about death, ‘borne patiently only by the corpse,’ as G.B. Shaw once said. And what are Cantatas 8 and 27? Also music about death.”

Cantatas No. 8 and 27 – the numbers are a cataloger’s caprice and have no relation to chronology – go along with 161 and 95 in the set for the 16th Sunday after Trinity; they were performed and recorded on October 7, 2000, at Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Death is the subject matter in all four works: not the tragedy at life’s end, but the release at life’s fulfillment. All four works include at least one aria, usually toward the end, that is downright jovial; the piece in jig time at the end of No. 8 is a ringer for the jiggety-jog at the end of the sixth “Brandenburg.” What I find even more striking are the opening movements, each of them a multilevel musical drama.

No. 161 dates from Bach’s Weimar years before he moved on to Cöthen and then to Leipzig. “Come, sweet hour of death . . .” sings the alto, and the chorus answers with comforting words: “Though the body be consumed by worms . . .” To complicate matters still further, a solo oboe intrudes with yet another tune, the so-called “Passion” chorale, which will be a frequent visitor throughout Bach’s legacy. A chorale tune in No. 95 hollers out a death warning over a syncopated chorus exulting that “Christ is my life!!!” No. 8, from the Leipzig years, starts off with that Brahmsian harmony, and with what is supposed to be a funeral chime but clanging (!) merrily; “Dear Lord,” sing the young men and women of the Monteverdi Choir, “when will I die?” Not soon, if the vitality in these superb new discs is any indication.?

Twinkle, Twinkle . . .

There is no music for piano, large-scale or small, quite like the G-major Sonata of Franz Schubert. Its first sounds tease your imagination: What instrument could Schubert possibly have had in mind, in October 1826, capable of producing the ethereal, meditative sonorities at the edge of silence that begin this piece – an instrument that, furthermore, would rise in fury moments later to renounce those harmonies with sustained outbursts, which must surely have intimidated the ears of the time? A few blocks away from Schubert’s humble studio, in the same Vienna at about the same time, Ludwig van Beethoven had also, in his “Hammerklavier” and other sonatas, explored another whole new range of piano sound. Schubert’s accomplishment, the daring of his invention in this one amazing sonata, is little less remarkable. He would compose three more great piano sonatas, all in 1828, the final year of his tragically shortened life; none was more adventuresome than this noble work of two years before.

Schubert himself was no piano master, and most of his writing for the instrument leans toward the ordinary. It is in this one work, this strange, willful amalgam of solemnity and giddiness, which would make its way into public acceptance far more slowly than the acclaimed late works of Beethoven, that he sets out to explore a new piano territory, and does so enchantingly. “It is right and proper,” proclaimed the Vienna Arts Journal, September 29, 1827, “to rank this work among the good pianoforte compositions that by no means aim at being mere dancing lessons for the fingers.” Lost in a hushed, dark landscape of whispered harmonies and understated bits of tunes, you meet a Schubert strange, mysterious and wonderful in unsuspected new ways. Further surprises – some astounding in their violence, some simply disarming – await around every turn. At the end, nearly 50 minutes later if the performer has observed all the prescribed repeats, there comes a final, smiling, exquisite rush of harmony that would not be out of place in Debussy, and you find yourselves sharing that smile.

Radu Lupu, who ended his Schumann-Schubert recital at Disney Hall last week with this G-major Sonata, honored all of Schubert’s repeats, but not all of the smile. I confess to being spoiled beyond redemption in the matter of this work, going back to Easter Sunday, 1948: Artur Schnabel performing in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. Schnabel had done more than any other pianist to restore Schubert’s large-scale works to public awareness, and from a seat onstage that afternoon I could watch the twinkle in Schubert’s miraculous modulations (G to E-flat to C at the drop of a pinkie) play out across the great musician’s face. I wait for that twinkle whenever the G-major Sonata is on the bill; I hear it in Mitsuko Uchida’s recording. There was a detectable twinkle that night in Lupu’s performance of Schumann’s Waldszenen (but not in his Humoreske, which I found dull beyond rescue), and not in the Schubert.

Lights Out

The Philharmonic’s five-year Shostakovich survey ended with nary a twinkle: the Symphony No. 13 in January, a gigantic outburst for dark voices compounded out of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s bitter anti-everything poetry, and No. 14 last week, equally long but for modest forces, linking death-tinged poetry not so much sardonic as directly tragic. (No. 15, the actual final work in the series, had been performed earlier in the season.) It has been a distinguished project, the more so since Esa-Pekka Salonen’s personal feelings on several of the works – including the Fifth Symphony, by some distance the most popular – were not exactly a secret. He originally announced that he would conduct the entire series, but then thought better. “Thinking better,” I guess, would include taking a good, hard look at, say, Nos. 11 and 12 – which did receive good performances, but in others’ hands.

No. 13, which was led by James Conlon, sets the Yevtushenko poetry about the Nazi massacre of the Jewish populace at Babi Yar and further thoughts on Soviet racism. On the first night, it was preceded by one of the Philharmonic’s “First Nights” minidramas, wherein actors from outside and orchestra members acted out a 30-or-so-minute biz about Shostakovich and Yevtushenko being harassed by Soviet cultural delegates and the performance of the work itself threatened. There are several of these entertainments buried like land mines through the season. (The next, on April 7, concerns Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, which, come to think of it, probably does need all the help it can get.) I don’t think I am alone in finding them just a tad patronizing. I can read program notes, and attend the Philharmonic’s pre-concert talks (which are good most of the time). Minitheatricals, however eloquent several of the orchestra’s sturdy players turn out to be, are an unnecessary burden. Be that as it may, the performance under Conlon was taut and dark and nicely lit from within by the young baritone Nmon Ford, who replaced the scheduled soloist.

No. 14 is a problem work, and worth the effort. Having Mahler on your mind helps: The deep, solemn opening might have fallen from the sketches from the Mahler 10th; the poems themselves share the mood of the Kindertotenlieder. The sparse scoring – strings, percussion and celesta as in Bartók’s great work, but with more prominence given to the death-rattle percussion – enforces careful listening. I was glad that the pre-concert entertainment this time included a Shostakovich string quartet (No. 14); it made for good ear training. The two soloists were baritone Matthias Goerne, who is familiar, and mezzo-soprano Tatiana Pavlovskaya, who is not but who is a superb, rich-voiced tragic singer whom I would love to hear in any dozen operatic roles.

Also on the program, and not insignificant, was Haydn’s Symphony No. 103, the “Drumroll,” one of the most adventurous and brilliantly scored of the 12 “London” Symphonies. We haven’t heard enough Haydn from Salonen lately; it makes for a superb matchup. Something about the edge in Haydn’s humor – the way, in this work, that the finale builds its theme on the repeating figure in the horns, and the back-and-forth major-minor in the slow-movement variations – exactly works in Salonen’s hands, and always has. No. 14 was a valuable experience, I suppose, but it was the Haydn that rode home with me in my head, and remains today.