So I've Heard

The Inner Music Silenced

Robert Wilson’s production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, as produced by the L.A. Opera two years ago, soared both on Puccini’s lyric urgency and on an inner music created out of Wilson’s own visions, his unique sense of stage movement and color, his repertory of gentle invention, to deepen – but not supplant – the dramatic sense of the work itself. Wilson’s art is serious and subtle; alas, like the Butterfly of the story, it languishes in his absence. It needs his guidance, in his famous painstaking rehearsal technique, to deal with matters of lighting, the positioning of hands, of exact body movement. As enhancement to Puccini’s all-too-famous tearjerker, Wilson drew upon our powers of recognition, for example, by his exact contrast between the hand positions of his Butterfly and the American Kate Pinkerton at their meeting, and it told worlds about the clash of their civilizations, adding a layer of information to an opera that can – and often should – just as easily be ignored as second-rate entertainment. He created a whole character out of Butterfly’s small boy, and gave him a lovely, appealing choreography to make us aware of the tragedy that will devastate his life after the opera’s final curtain.

Wilson hasn’t been here for the current Butterfly revival (through February 19), which is not badly performed on the whole, but is no longer the deeply haunting stage masterwork of two years ago. A small boy – Nathan Cruz on the night I went, one of two brothers alternating in the role – busied himself amusingly on the stage, but he was merely cute and not at all moving. I found no fault with Patricia Racette and Marcus Haddock as the leads; they looked and sounded like every Mr. amp; Mrs. Pinkerton you’d expect in a major-league opera house. Margaret Thompson’s Suzuki is familiar coinage hereabouts; Vladimir Chernov’s Sharpless fulfilled his modest demands – well, modestly. The young Israeli conductor Dan Ettinger, impressive in last season’s Aida, continues to impress.

No, there were no musical faults, and dozens of big-time houses would not be ashamed asking $205 for this night of opera. But this production rests on the memory of something far finer: haunting to the eye and the dramatic sense, with lighting beautifully controlled (not contaminated, as it is now, with follow spots), a dramatic cast whose body movements mesh with what words and music are struggling to proclaim, the overall sense that even this maligned Puccini potboiler can be made to matter. It did then; it doesn’t, quite, now.

The Presentable Past .?.?.

Concerts at the Getty Center come nicely planned but burdened with a problem. It’s a fine idea to immerse yourself in a current exhibition and then, a few feet away, experience music related in time and impulse to what you’ve just seen. On a recent Saturday, there was the beguilement of a small room hung with the awesome lavishness of Titian: two military portraits in full Renaissance panoply and a Magdalene, plus a showcase of small engravings of similar splendor; one left short of breath. At the Harold M. Williams Auditorium down the way, the five members of the Hilliard Ensemble sang wonderful music of that exact time, all the parts of a Mass by Nicolas Gombert (1495-1560 or thereabouts) and works of near-contemporaries including one gorgeously complex motet by Josquin Desprez, who may have been Gombert’s teacher.

To hear is to adore. Gombert’s earmarks are a certain wildness, a complexity in the way his lines of counterpoint push against one another, that gives his music a kind of momentum different from the serenity of Josquin. And the problem at the Getty is that the Williams Auditorium, the only performing space, is not a concert hall at all but a dry lecture room that sucks the sound out of performers (unless they’re an amplified rock group). You could feel singers straining to get the sound out, especially the higher voices, and the result was not pleasant. The whole of the Gombert Mass, plus other works, is out on a new ECM disc by the Hilliards, and the sound of the group at ECM’s wonderful small church, Austria’s Propstei St. Gerold, is to the Getty sound as choirs of angels are to your local boiler factory.

At Westwood’s United Methodist, I heard most of Musica Angelica’s “Splendor of Venice” concert before dashing over (along with several of the players) to the Chamber Orchestra’s Mozart program I exulted over last week. Italy’s Rinaldo Alessandrini was the guest conductor, but it’s the orchestra’s regular conductor, Martin Haselböck, who deserves a low bow for reshaping this into the really fine Baroque orchestra it has always tried to be. Their program – you know, Locatelli, Vivaldi, Albinoni, the usual – came off with spirit and a sense of discovery and even, in a bloodletting Geminiani concerto, the message that this music isn’t all the same after all. Angelica is back on a one-concert-per-month basis; Mozart on February 24 and 26. If you’d written them off, as I had for a while, it’s time to write them back on.

Pierre Without Fear

Pierre Boulez made his first entry into local awareness with his Le Marteau Sans Maître, whose score he had under his arm when he first arrived here. Every local musician who survived that first performance – ask Bill Kraft, for one – has his own nightmare story about that Monday Evening Concert, March 1957. Robert Craft, who was supposed to conduct, gave up; Boulez came to the rescue and rehearsed for 10 days. The program also included electronic Stockhausen. “If this is music,” fumed the Times‘ Albert Goldberg, “it’s time to drop the H-bomb.”

Over the years, Le Marteau has subsisted as much on its bogeyman reputation as on its actual quality; this was the work in which the outlooks of the young (32) Boulez first crystallized into musical shape. Live performances remain rare. At the last Green Umbrella Concert, the Philharmonic’s young assistant conductor, Alexander Mickelthwate, led Le Marteau as what it now is: a contemporary work of great complexity, but also great beauty rising most of all from embedded melodic lines, sinuous and rapturous and no more threatening to the ear than beautiful, great music of any other time.

The Humanist

Once again there is an Anniversary; I have barely gotten through the 179 CDs of Philips’ 1991 compleat Mozart, a splendid highlight of the recording industry as it then flourished. Now there will be another Mozart torrent, even while word also arrives of serious-minded record stores, and labels, too, going out of business. Consider the alternative; a New Yorker cartoon, stuck on my fridge like a memento mori, shows a desert, bleak beyond imagining. The caption: “World without Mozart.”

We grant him a special place – “I hate classical music, except for Mozart, of course” – because of his uncanny take on the human condition and the ease with which this understanding comes through in the music. The great late operas prove this the most easily, but they are not alone. Listen, for starters, to the amazing display of human emotions and reactions in the 20 or so minutes of nonstop interaction that ends the second act of Figaro. The Count, with murder on his mind, thunders forth his menacing octaves; the Countess, quite honestly terrified, dithers in shivering roulades. Then the closet door opens to reveal not the expected philandering Cherubino but the blameless Susanna, and the stupefied Count is reduced to a monotone while the women giggle around him in triumph. On and on the scene proceeds: More people join in, more complex the music grows, with every line a separate, beautifully preserved personage. And while all this is happening, Mozart is also working within the classic framework that involves our listening process with the logic of key change, key return – the design that makes it all work.

Verdi’s operas are full of marvelous character depictions; Wagner’s Ring drew tears, even in those patched-together performances at Long Beach last week. But it is to Mozart that I turn for the sublime equilibrium of musical shape and the power to stir the emotions through the balance of harmony and design. The operas make this power the most accessible because of the words. But it is a power ingrained in Mozart’s music itself, almost from the start of his amazing if brief trajectory. One of the few honest episodes in the otherwise execrable Amadeus comes when Salieri overhears and eloquently describes the slow movement of the Serenade for 13 Winds (361 in Koechel’s chronological catalog of Mozart’s works) and is undone by mingled awe and jealousy. (“I was suddenly frightened. . . . It seemed to me that I had heard a voice of God!”) If ever words have served to describe the process of falling in love with a piece of music, perhaps beyond reason, let it be these.

The Synthesis

You can undergo similar processes in the whole treasury of “wordless operas,” the dozen piano concertos from Mozart’s last years in Vienna, in which, time after time, the interplay between solo piano and orchestra becomes a serious, loving conversation on subject matter too subtle for words. Even more than the symphonies – and the violin concertos, which are works from youthful days – Mozart’s mature piano concertos represent a synthesis between his operatic language and his individualistic orchestral idiom in which the woodwinds of the orchestra take on almost human characteristics. This past weekend, Jeffrey Kahane and the L.A. Chamber Orchestra began their series of Mozart piano concertos, which will run into next year, and on that first concert, the last work – the G-major Concerto, K. 453 – has a slow movement that is a marvel among marvels in this regard. The orchestra proposes a small fragment of a theme; the piano responds with the theme ever so slightly varied; the tone gradually deepens, then lightens; and after eight or nine minutes we find that, unconsciously, we’ve moved to the edge of our seats – as if to connect with every word of a profound overheard discourse with words unspoken but clearly understood.

These marvelous works constitute by themselves a wide-ranging repertory of Mozartian dramatic devices. The March 12 program includes two works whose slow movements are almost too emotionally draining to coexist on a single evening: the C-major K. 467 and the A-major K. 488. The first of these contributed a slow movement to a very pretty if morose Swedish film romance under the name of Elvira Madigan, where it kept getting clipped off in midphrase by a director obviously tone-deaf. The A-major has a slow movement of similarly breath-stopping beauty, a melody for one finger, stark and simple. And on May 21 there is the great E-flat Concerto, K. 482, the most grandly orchestrated of the concertos, in which all kinds of strange and wonderful things happen in all three movements, including a conclusion to the slow movement that leaves you in a “What hit me?” state of mind.

Near the end of his life, Mozart discovered the music of Bach, from manuscripts in the libraries of Viennese collectors, and from his own discoveries on journeys to Bach’s churches in Leipzig. The possibilities of creating drama by ramming lines of counterpoint together in daring and novel ways impressed him deeply, and the parts of the Requiem that he actually completed can lead us to tantalizing speculation as to what his next works would have been, with mastery of contrapuntal devices even more firmly in hand. To me, the last of Mozart’s symphonies, the so-called “Jupiter,” is the real synthesis of his command over the complex musical textures that he gleaned from his contrapuntal explorations. Even before the famous finale, the working out in this exultant, extroverted work is uncommonly rich-textured – the wisps of string tone surrounding the themes in the slow movement, the brass punctuation in the minuet: Could classical orchestration have moved further than this deep, lustrous sonority? Then comes the finale, with its five-part melding of voices, a composer triumphantly staking out his conquest over the complexity of his art.

It didn’t end there, of course. After came the profound sublimity of the Clarinet Concerto and the endearing sublimity of The Magic Flute. And it doesn’t really end then, either. The next Mozart year comes in 2041; see you then.

Rhine Stones

If you raise a questioning eyebrow at the news that the Long Beach Opera is currently offering a reasonable likeness of Richard Wagner’s 18-hour Ring of the Nibelung in something close to 10 hours, that can only mean that you don’t know Long Beach’s not-so-little opera-company-that-could (and does) and its infinite capacity for inflicting creative mayhem upon the jewels of the repertory and for making it all (like this sentence) work out at the end. And if you hustle down to Long Beach’s Center Theater – a welcoming performing space even when empty but far better this very weekend for the second of the company’s two Ring-arounds – you can verify all this for yourself.

To be sure, the version at hand, created by Jonathan Dove for Britain’s Birmingham Opera and also currently in the repertory of Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, reduced both in time scale and in orchestration, takes a few tucks in Wagnerian holy writ that will surely send ardent apostles of the Bard of Bayreuth – a stiff-chinned lot at best – up walls. Conversational tidbits gleaned during intermissions at Long Beach last weekend were studded with revolutionary rumbles of the sort that might have landed the Master himself on proscribed lists in his day. Those unhappy souls will find their surcease locally next fall from – of all unexpected sources – Russia’s Kirov, whose Costa Mesa Ring promises to be longer and surely louder.

I, too, await this benefice with mind, heart and rump at the ready, as I have many such experiences in the past. Meanwhile, I found little difficulty in identifying this 10-hour squeezed-together two-day (instead of the usual five) “Ringlet” as an authentic Wagnerian experience, at times an exhilarating one, and seldom below competence: pure Long Beach, in other words. Credit, above all, falls to Andreas Mitisek, who in his years with the company – first as chief conductor and now as artistic director – has grasped the founding ideals of Michael Milenski and advanced them as if in a single breath. With an orchestra of a mere 25, mostly young, and placed in the theater behind the action so that eye contact between conductor and actors was impossible, Mitisek was still able somehow to mold a reasonably cohesive performance, one in which – the Gods’ entry into Valhalla, for one instance – you could almost imagine an authentic Wagnerian sonority. No, it wasn’t Bayreuth, and it wasn’t even the Met or Seattle, but I have the feeling that those fussbudget, dyed-in-the-dirndl Wagnerians were really struggling to have as rotten a time as they were proclaiming in the Long Beach intermissions last weekend.

Jonathan Eaton managed the stage action, in a single area around a ring-shaped structure set off with Danila Korogodsky’s gadgetry, including standing headless statuary of various sizes and forms and a huge suspended ball stuck with skulls on spikes that stood for the Rhine’s gold but reminded me more of those cheese-ball hors d’oeuvres at fancy parties. Stage movement was mostly of the lurch-‘n’-clutch school; success with the elegant complexities of Andrew Porter’s English text was varied.

I did, however, hear some excellent singing, by a few old friends and a number of new ones. Among the former was the tenor Gary Lehman, who sang the ardent Siegmund with a fine thread of the tragic; he had been the substitute Parsifal with the L.A. Opera last fall. John Duykers, one of our great character singers, was the Mime in Siegfried, making me regret that the role had been cut from Rhinegold. The Perry brothers, Eugene and Herbert, whom everybody remembers from the Peter Sellars video of Don Giovanni set in Harlem, sang the brothers Fasolt and Fafner in Rhinegold, and Herbert came back to do the Fafner in Siegfried. Among singers new to me I found particular pleasure in Suzan Hanson, who returned to life after 20 years asleep as the Brünnhilde in Siegfried and bounced and cavorted (with Dan Snyder as a cavorting Boy Scout Siegfried) like the lady in the sleeping-pill ads: a new tack on Brünnhilde and a delightful one. (She sobered up properly in the final Twilight of the Gods.)

Yes, cuts are cuts. And there are good reasons to raise eyebrows, as I am wont to do, at the kind of damage done to accepted masterpieces that this Ring treatment represents. One slash I found truly unacceptable: the murder of Siegfried that took place without the motivation of the preceding music in which the hero’s memory had begun to return, leading to the Funeral March, which everybody knows and loves, but which was chopped in half. I recognized many of the cuts, but I also recognized the music around them as authentic Wagner and authentically beautiful, and there were times when that was enough. Ten hours with Wagner’s Ring is no small strudel.

Keepers of the Flame

A questioning eyebrow at the most recent Monday Evening Concert, confronted with the news of the series’ approaching final flicker, might well question; the program by XTET, the intelligence in its choices and the strengths in its execution were close to anybody’s ideal as to what constitutes a perfect evening of new-music presentation. Word, furthermore, had gotten around; the crowd was large and enthusiastic. What kind of managerial fool puts such enterprise to rest?

Yet the County Museum management seemed bent on playing the fool, or at least on sabotaging the event. The sound system – which, as any fool will tell you, is crucial to any new-music event – was left untended; there were no stagehands to assist in the considerable between-numbers rearrangement; the program might have worked just as well out on the sidewalk. With the growing attention afforded our city for its cultural growth (as in last Sunday’s New York Times music section), you’d almost think that LACMA was out to bring public disgrace upon itself on purpose.

The program began with a whimsical reminder of better times, a Stravinsky song that had had its world premiere at a Monday Evening Concert way back when. The big new works were by local composer Tom Flaherty – an exceptionally appealing duo for cello and marimba – and a Passion-inspired ensemble work by the East Coast’s Christopher Rouse. XTET, one of our truly significant freelance ensembles, whose regular members include the treasurable singer Daisietta Kim and the sturdy cellist Roger Lebow, has been performing new music at LACMA for 20 years. With a couple of misguided pen strokes, it is about to become homeless.

Aching Beauty

Three years ago I wrote under the spell of Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin, whose American premiere I had attended at the Santa Fe Opera. The recording that was promised at the time has now materialized, a Deutsche Grammophon DVD, identical to the Santa Fe production (which had come originally from Paris’ Thétre du Chtelet) except that the conductor is now Esa-Pekka Salonen, a longtime friend of and fellow student with Saariaho in their native Finland. We heard some music from the opera a year ago, when Salonen preceded one of the acts of the so-called “Tristan Project” with a suite of excerpts, a wise move since both operas in their way breathe similar sorrows and undergo similar pain. L’Amour de Loin is a work of extraordinary power and beauty. Hear it, if you will, remembering the Metropolitan Opera’s recent broadcast of the workaday exemplar of what passes for innovative, contemporary opera in some circles these days – Tobias Picker’s drab note-spinning around Dreiser’s An American Tragedy– and it may restore your hope that, somewhere on the planet, opera does, indeed, survive. It is a work that, furthermore, restores the lyric stage to the level of myth and mystery, of appeal to an audience to lose itself in timeless imagery – not just the reworking of some popular movie scenario. It is, in other words, a genuine opera.

The text, by the Paris-based Arab writer Amin Maalouf, is drawn from the medieval account of the troubadour Jaufré Rudel, the Countess Clémence whom he worships from afar for her purity of heart and body, and the Pilgrim who crosses the Mediterranean to carry messages to the separated lovers. At the end they are united in transfiguring death. Peter Sellars’ evocative production fills the stage with water, not only to signify the gulf separating the lovers, but to cast a rippling shimmer that gorgeously reflects Saariaho’s deep, dark, achingly beautiful music – its orchestra wondrously enhanced by subtly interspersed electronics. Dawn Upshaw’s final ironic outburst, as the dead Jaufré (Gerald Finley, San Francisco’s recent Oppenheimer) lies in her arms, is, simply put, the stuff of sublime operatic drama.

Try This on Your iPod

I’ve had to add new shelves for my operatic DVDs. While classical recordings dwindle, or self-feed on repackaged reissues, the flood of video operas continues unabated and, for the most part, rewarding. I can remember when experiencing just the sounds of Wagner’s Ring at home meant piecing together several albums of excerpts with varied casts and agonizing omissions. Now my shelves bend under the weight of five complete videos of the cycle. One of these, from the Metropolitan, follows Wagner’s stage rubrics more or less literally: the sword in the tree, Brünnhilde the same soprano awakened on her rocks as when she was put to sleep there 20 years before, the dragon Fafner an honest-to-Wotan fire-breather and not just some hydroelectric monstrosity on the banks of the Rhine. The others, however, take all kinds of staging liberties, while offering plenty of proof that the world these days is well populated with good-to-excellent Wagnerian singers. Instead of being starved for the sound of a single proper Wagnerian performance on your home Victrola, in other words, you had damn well better be prepared to wrestle with the luxury of owning all five.

An opera date at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion can run you $410 these nights, tickets alone. Far be it from me to shoo you off the box-office line, but consider what else $410 can land you, including – since we’re still in the season of list-making – 10 marvelous operatic DVDs, Wagner aside, that can get you a lot closer to excellent performances than connections at the Chandler box office ever could. That’ll leave you something over for dinner – not at Patina maybe, but too much of that stuff isn’t good for you.

Let’s proceed chronologically. The fascinating Pierre Audi production of Monteverdi’s Return of Ulysses that played here back in the Peter Hemmings days is available now, with some of the cuts restored, on a two-disc Opus Arte set, again conducted by Glen Wilson. Move on then to my favorite among half a dozen Don Giovannis: Riccardo Muti conducting on Opus Arte, with Thomas Allen as Mozart’s incurable rake and Ann Murray as the tragic, put-upon Elvira. Also on Opus Arte: a spectacular containment of Berlioz’s Les Troyens from Paris’ Chtelet, with Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducting his properly named Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and our own Susan Graham as Dido.

Achim Freyer is remembered here better for his marvelous staging of the Berlioz Faust than for his fussed-with Bach Mass; one of his stage masterworks was his production of Weber’s Der Freischütz as a real Germanic folktale, and a Kultur DVD has nicely captured a Stuttgart performance conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. For Carmen there is an interesting choice: two performances with Plácido Domingo’s prime Don José. On TDK there’s a Franco Zeffirelli staging, quite old (1978) but conducted by the legendary Carlos Kleiber; the other, on TriStar, is the Francesco Rosi movie, with Julia Migenes-Johnson. You really need both; hell, they’re only one disc each. For The Barber of Seville only one choice is possible: Cecilia Bartoli, on ArtHaus, in a shameless flirtation with her cast, with Rossini’s music and with us all.

For any composer named Strauss, again only one choice is possible. Something about Kleiber’s presence in the pit becomes an irradiating force that can reach out to his orchestra, to his singers and to the audience. I was able to feel it during my one in-person experience, and much of that presence lingers as captured on video; I don’t want to try to explain it further than that. Anyhow, there are Deutsche Grammophon DVDs of Die Fledermaus and two performances of Der Rosenkavalier that somehow under Kleiber’s leadership become transformed into the excelsis of wise, all-knowing, human comedy. If people really knew how to immerse themselves in any or all of these miraculous events, the makers of Prozac would suddenly recognize their product as superfluous.

For Verdi, I can let myself be bowled over by the sheer force of Jon Vickers’ Otello (on DG, with Herbert von Karajan conducting) and try not to notice the lousy lip-synching. Bryn Terfel’s larger-than-life Falstaff (from the recent Covent Garden production) on BBC is the one performance I’ve seen on video that might persuade me to look into one of those oversize HDTV jobs. On the other hand, I hear that the 2-inch pictures on those new TV iPods are pretty good, too.

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.

The Babe Set Free
At its first hearing here (March 2003, at the Old Place), El Niño was warmly received, but with one reservation almost unanimously voiced. John Adams’ musical evocation of the Nativity story is, for most of its two-hour length, powerful and haunting, made especially so by the superb writing for its vocal soloists, including soprano Dawn Upshaw, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and baritone Willard White. The text is a conflation of ancient poetry with modern Hispanic poetry by women writers, including some dealing with topics parallel to the Nativity story – e.g., the massacre of students in Mexico City in 1968 – assembled by Adams with some input from Peter Sellars. The plan also originally included a stage production by Sellars plus a film, in which the participants in the biblical action became teenagers in, possibly, an East L.A. barrio, with Maria and José and their niño pursued into the Mojave by Herod’s cops in a Toyota truck.It was that visual stuff, which also showed up on the DVD conducted by Kent Nagano, that was widely regarded as the one major impediment to a full awareness of the stature of the work – of Adams’ music, and of the literary sensitivity with which the text was assembled from its many sources. “My own Messiah,” Adams called the work at Disney last week in his marvelously congenial pre-concert talk, and that is what the work now, free of its visuals, truly is. You don’t need a movie for Messiah. In the sense of bringing a hearer close to one of civilization’s prime miracles, there are passages in El Niño that have the same power to grab and vibrate the spirit as parallel moments in Handel’s incomparable score. Take, as an ecstatic example, Handel’s “For unto us a Son is born”; set it up against the same scene in the Adams retelling that also undoes me utterly: a setting for full ensemble of the Hildegard von Bingen text as “The Son of God through/Her secret passage/Came forth like the dawn.”Shorn of Sellars’ intellectual overload – which may, for all I know, make a pretty good movie in itself, about teenage love and loss in East L.A. – El Niño takes its place at the very top of Adams’ major scores, a work of overpowering compassion and warmth of emotion. Its text, which bestrides the centuries with historical and emotional similarities – the matchup between Herod’s massacre of the Israelite children and the Mexico City outrage is, of course, especially tricky – is rendered viable by the power and range of Adams’ music. His orchestra is, for him, relatively modest: no trumpets, horns and trombones used in quiet masses, discreet synthesizer, few strings. The music is carried, most of all, by the sheer beauty of the vocal lines. The pure, untroubled wonderment of Dawn Upshaw’s virginal responses to the Annunciating Angel is a sound you want to live with forever.Upshaw and Willard White (now “Sir”) have been with the work from its beginning; Michelle DeYoung has taken over, quite well, since Hunt Lieberson’s illness. Esa-Pekka Salonen, our old Adams hand, quite clearly welcomed the chance to let the work assume its proper aural grandeur. Hearing El Niño at Disney unencumbered – twice, I delightedly report – was like discovering a brand-new masterpiece.
Diversions
No sooner had the stardust settled from the morning performance of the Adams glory than siege was laid to the Disney stage by the assembled forces of the ineffable P.D.Q. Bach and his scarcely more effable doppelgänger, Peter Schickele. A newly fangled P.D.Q. cantata, “Gott sei dank, dass heute Freitag ist,” figured clamorously among the offerings: “God be thank that today Friday is” (which indeed it was). The Schickele/P.D.Q. team has been at it lo these many decades; everyone I spoke to the other night had his own memories, usually involving Great Entrances: down the high wire, up from the Hollywood Bowl lagoon, the post-deadline tumultuous dash down the center aisle. Friday’s mere mosey out from the wings at concert time seemed a letdown. Okay; muscles get old, and stiff. I might have thought the audience (near-capacity, as usual) would be mostly old-timers reliving memories. The high percentage of teens and college-age kids was encouraging.The muscles have stiffened; the brain has not. A tiny set of Shakespeare settings was ascribed to Schickele, not to P.D.Q., but in reality it had a delightful mix of both: elegant, literate poetic bits (soliloquies from Macbeth, Romeo and Hamlet and Marc Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar musicked to tiny shards of jazz, boogie-woogie, blues, etc., but none lasting more than a sneeze). Two choral pieces – one delectably titled The Art of the Ground Round, the other a clutch of anti-Christmas ditties – nicely underscored the underlying marvel of this whole P.D.Q. Bach business: an unerring sense of humor combined with the musical knowledge to reinvent an imitation, just slightly skewed musical style so close to the victim of its satire that you just never know the which from the what.A supporting orchestra, mostly Philharmonic players, went nicely along with the gags under Joana Carneiro’s direction. Soprano Michèle Eaton, tenor profundo David Düsing and an enchanting small handful of mezzo-soprano named Gian-Carla Tisera made up the vocal contingent.Parsiflage: On December 14, the L.A. Opera fielded a new Parsifal in Robert Wilson’s production at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, unannounced beforehand (even to staff members) until the ailing Plácido Domingo took the microphone right at the 6:30 curtain. Gary Lehman was his name, and, for all that, he wasn’t at all bad: slender and youthful, the voice clean and bright, only a little pinched at top. Who is he? His vita lists him as a leading baritone at several opera companies, with no tenor experience listed except that he is working on Parsifal and Siegmund – the Domingo/Wagner repertory, in other words. There’s nothing like starting at the top.

Andsnes in Depth

The Philharmonic has had the admirable idea, for the last couple of years, of
inviting some of the more interesting guest artists to tarry in town for more
than the usual one-week stint, to display a broader range of their interests than
just a single concerto. Last year’s “on location” visitor was
Emanuel Ax; this year, Leif Ove Andsnes took part in four different programs (nine
concerts in all) and departed a respected, valued and well-known friend. He returns
in May in yet another kind of program, as participant in a Lieder recital with
Ian Bostridge.

At 35, handsome and plain-mannered on the stage, Andsnes seems phenomenally right
for his time and for ours. He has followed the proper paths, won the right competitions,
paid his dues with the apposite number of Grieg Concerto performances to honor
his Norwegian ancestry, recorded the requisite Rach 3. In his first concert here,
he played Mozart – the G-minor Piano Quartet and the Piano-Wind Quintet
– with Philharmonic members at one of the Chamber Music Society programs,
and it was all very correct and well-balanced, if somewhat dry. In his final concert,
he again played Mozart, the E-flat Piano Concerto (K. 449), the first of the series
composed for Vienna; this time he, Esa-Pekka Salonen and a small Philharmonic
contingent joined in exploring the sheer delights of a work too often undervalued:
whimsy, surprise and, in the slow movement, melody to charm the senses –
nearly half an hour of wise, airborne music making.

Turning to music of our own time, Andsnes accomplished some eloquent pleading
on behalf of two major, unalike masters: Hungary’s quixotic, secretive Gyouml;rgy
Kurtág, whose thoughts unwind in lapidary nuggets of often little more
than a breath’s duration, and the supremely rational Marc-André Dalbavie
of France, who works in grand designs subtle but clear. At a Green Umbrella event,
there was music of both – a night of spine-tingling discoveries. At the
start came a clutch of Kurtág’s “Game” pieces for solo
piano, some of less than a minute’s duration, small, flashing, uncut gemstones
to dazzle eye and ear at once. At the end, there was the Tactus of Dalbavie, music
for nine instruments with the piano of Andsnes serving as a rhetorical pivot.
This I found even more extraordinary, a work that seemed to balance major dramatic
material with a remarkable clarity of organization that made the geography of
the music clear and involving at every point. Not much strong new music these
days treats its listeners with that degree of respect. Dalbavie – whom I
know also from a disc on the Naiuml;ve label with a big Violin Concerto and a
piece rightly titled Color – is someone eminently worth our attention.
Andsnes performs his Piano Concerto in Chicago sometime next year.

Anyhow, the Umbrella concert had other small pleasures along the way, including
a madcap piece by Kurtág with toy trumpets and harmonicas deployed through
the hall. Andsnes did, of course, get to play the Grieg Concerto during his time
here – at the end of the “Northern” program I wrote about last
week – and he played it with all the notes in place. That concert began
with Salonen conducting Sibelius’ Finlandia. To every man his albatross.

88 x 2

Piotr Anderszewski began his Disney Hall recital (the night following Andsnes’
departure) with Mozart (the C-minor pairing of Fantasy and Sonata) and ended with
Bach (the D-minor English Suite): serious stuff, in other words, with performances
to match. I have missed previous appearances (and recordings) by this Polish-born
pianist of Hungarian-Polish parentage, which was a mistake; this was a terrific
recital. It was so, most of all, in the Bach. No two pairs of ears will ever agree
on piano Bach, and the sins committed in the matter are egregious and legion (see
below). Anderszewski’s performance was notable for its detail and its perspective.
It was not a piano trying to be any kind of older instrument, and it was not a
piano taking off on old musical patterns to indulge in a virtuoso spree (see below).
It was a re-creation of superb musical designs whose light and shade had possessed
a certain integrity on its original instrument, but which can be reconstituted
– with a new outlay of integrity – on another.

In this great work, perhaps the most complex of all the English Suites, the splendid
young (36) pianist had found the way to preserve the power of that complexity.
I’ve been trying to remember hearing another performance of that suite on
a modern piano in which I was left so free to concentrate on Bach and less on
its performer – Glenn Gould or Edwin Fischer or that self-indulgent Tureck
woman or whoever; I don’t think I can. The Mozart pairing also drew a big,
thunderous performance – which this music can stand. The set of Szymanowski’s
Métopes – three gorgeous pieces full of the aura of Greek
ruins and reminiscences of Odysseus’ sea journey – moved me to acquire
that music, by that pianist, on the Virgin label.

The pianist Sergey Schepkin was a curious entry in this season’s Monday
Evening Concerts lineup, which is otherwise devoted to heroes from past seasons.
Who knew him, and from where? A program note identifying him as a laureate of
a Maestro Foundation Fellowship should have been a red flag, since Maestro is
a dilettante operation devoted to good food and innocuous music in a Santa Monica
private home. Schepkin was booked to LACMA on the strength of his promise to perform
a work of the Monday Evening Concerts’ late guiding spirit, Dorrance Stalvey,
but he then found the style of the music too difficult and backed down. We were
left, instead, with a short work by Sofia Gubaidulina not at all representative
of her style, and a performance of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations
that might raise words like disgraceful to new expressive heights: slippery
glissandos, drooling rubatos – the kind of virtuoso spree (see above) that
might appeal to Maestro’s dilettantes, but to nobody that you or I might
care to know. That he decided, properly, to honor all of Bach’s specified
repeats only intensified the annoyance.

Painting by Tahir Salahov,Courtesy Los AngelesPhilharmonicDark Regions
E-flat minor is dank and sinister territory. Ascribing personalities to specific tonalities is a shifty business at best; very often mere mechanical considerations of particular instruments make the difference. The E-string is the highest on the violin, therefore works in that key will be high-pitched; French horns are most at their ease in E-flat; clarinets in B-flat. But as you journey around the circle of fifths and end up in E-flat minor – six flats – you’ve arrived in music’s no man’s land, an area bleak and unpopulated. Few enough pieces inhabit the realm – a strange and aimless late piano work by Schubert, a spook-haunted Brahms Intermezzo, the two craggy pairs of Preludes and Fugues in Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier, nary a movement by Mozart, Haydn or Beethoven. Later on there’s one monstrously dull String Quartet by Tchaikovsky and then, finally, the last quartet of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 15, as dismal – yet as heart-rending – as any 35-minute expanse in the entire realm of chamber-music masterworks. Four members of the Philharmonic – violinists Bing Wang and Varty Manouelian, violist Meredith Snow, cellist Peter Stumpf – explored the mysteries of No. 15 at a recent Chamber Music Society concert. Fortunately, there was Mozart afterward to serve as balm, but it was the Shostakovich, in a superb performance, that left me the most shaken, and I still am.How explain this unbroken sequence: six movements all marked adagio, funereal in pace and in mood but never boring, never relaxing their hold? They challenge explainers; a couple of years ago Britain’s Thétre de Complicité and the Emerson Quartet came to UCLA with a kind of live documentary in which that quartet took shape out of tragic and harrowing memory fragments. The stage presentation was a marvelous experience, but no more so than the ensuing simple performance of the work itself – which, as I recall, the Emersons delivered standing up, as if in homage. Tahir Salahov’s painted portrait of Shostakovich dates from the same time as the Quartet – 1974, a year before the composer’s death – and that, too, seems to emerge from the music itself.There is, of course, a problem inherent in this music, and in hearing all music so deeply personal and mysterious. Andrew Porter, whose New Yorker reviews are my constant reading, writes a sad account of a New York concert at which a lap dog in a canvas bag, carried by a woman to a performance of No. 15, began to yap during the final measures. No such horror occurred at Disney Hall, but evidence of human presence was, nevertheless, constantly at hand. Total and all-inclusive audibility is one of the less admirable aspects of the hall’s acoustic splendors. You can write in a figurative sense, as I am wont to do, about the Shostakovich 15th Quartet as music that stops the breath; stopping the sneeze and the cough is, alas, quite another matter.About Mozart’s G-minor Piano Quartet, with its ethereal slow movement, and the burbling delights of his E-flat Quintet for Piano and Winds – both ennobled by the visiting blithe spirit of pianist Leif Ove Andsnes – I will have more to say at our next rendezvous. After the Shostakovich, at least, these two works restored the power and pleasure of normal breathing.
Brighter Lands
Here’s a new name for you: Wilhelm Stenhammar. His music, says conductor Neeme Järvi, “is like Brahms, only better,” and, indeed, it is Järvi who has toiled the most nobly – in concerts and on recordings – to keep the name alive some 80 years later. Esa-Pekka Salonen’s recent performance of Stenhammar’s F-major Serenade was the Philharmonic’s first ever. It formed the centerpiece of an all-Northern program, the least inevitable element of a bill that otherwise included, wouldn’t you bet, the well-trodden Piano Concerto of Edvard Grieg (freshly reconsidered by Andsnes but still Grieg) and – everybody rise – the Finlandia of Sibelius.I am not ready to climb rooftops and proclaim the exhumation of the Stenhammar Serenade as the rebirth of a cruelly neglected genius from the past. Furthermore, if you’ve been following these lines over the years, you should know how easy it would be to compose better music than Brahms. But this 35-minute effusion of Stenhammar’s is a thoroughly attractive piece, enough so to make you wonder how many other big orchestral works are lurking out there, denied recognition because they come from the “wrong” country, or from composers who can’t also afford a press agent. Where is our Bulgarian repertory? Or Icelandic? Or Portuguese?Stenhammar was Swedish. His Serenade dates from around 1914. As with most composers of Northern persuasion – Sibelius included – it was a trip to Italy that warmed his creative juices, and this the Serenade makes delightfully clear. Despite the informality suggested by the title, it is a big, expansive work including a full percussion contingent. The first and last movements make the broadest statements, but I find the three connected inner movements the most original and the most charming: a moonlit waltz, a frisky scherzo and an ethereal nocturne. The last few pages, a hilarious change of pace reminiscent of, let’s say, the very end of Der Rosenkavalier, are the best of all. If I detected, as I think I did, some real affection in Salonen’s performance, let this be a prod to continue his Stenhammar researches. The Philharmonic, the Times‘ Ginell had it, “betrayed some unease with its difficulties.” Curious, the coven of musical second-stringers at that journal. Do you suppose they invent those wacko opinions just to fill the space?Obiter dictum: God bless Amazon.com. It came up with a used copy of the Stenhammar Serenade (Järvi, on BIS), which bore a sticker: “Discard from the Milton, MA, Public Library.” Nostalgia: 1935, a lady at the Milton Public Library helping an eager 11-year-old with research for the Milton Junior High Stamp Club Poster Competition. (I won.)

Photo by Robert MillardSacred
Richard Wagner’s Parsifal stands as one of opera’s unassailable peaks; full credit is due to any company for attempting the work at all – and, I suppose, to any audience willing to undergo its five-hour dimensions. Further credit, then, redounds to our local company for assuming the difficulties of an already famous production that compounds those hazards with a personal stamp involving a certain denial of elements that might ease the lengthy journey. Robert Wilson’s Parsifal does not add up to a jolly evening at Mrs. Chandler’s opera pavilion, but it is a stirring and unforgettable experience nevertheless. A week of performances remains, and I urge you to join me in taking advantage.There are, of course, other ways of dealing with this “consecrational festival drama” than the superlative deployment of empty space out of which Wilson’s conception is largely built. It can be made very beautiful, very “Wagnerian” if you will, with forests and cathedral-like spaces and gorgeous gardens of ravishing flower-maidens. If memory serves, the Metropolitan Opera’s Parsifal looks like this, or used to. There is a wonderful film version, available on DVD, by the German director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, which links an excellent musical performance to a huge array of symbolic paraphernalia in which the Knights of the Grail morph into Nazi storm troopers, Parsifal undergoes a gender change (visually, not vocally) after enduring Kundry’s kiss, and the stage itself turns into Wagner’s death mask.If you know Wilson’s work – his Madama Butterfly here two seasons ago, which is scheduled to return next month, or the Gluck operas available on DVD – you know that his stage ideal embraces none of the above. Or – let me put this another way – his stage ideal is to respect his audience’s imagination to create this kind of drama for ourselves. He has claimed that his Parsifal – which, by the way, I first saw and admired in Houston some 15 years ago – has been purged of its religious element. This I don’t quite believe; he has, however, relieved us of churchgoing, turned the Hall of the Grail into a vast, brightly lit space in which Wagner and we are free to interact. Space in Wilson – around the dancing numerals in Einstein on the Beach, around the solo dancing of the young boy at the end of Butterfly, or now in Parsifal – is rendered sacred by the music that is allowed to expand within it. It consists of great distances, which we are then entrusted to fill in.And this is the overriding value of this marvelous production now on view. If Plácido Domingo has no business bending his aging tones to the sounds of the youthful Parsifal on his journey of self-discovery, that’s the price one pays in the opera racket. As recompense, there is the rich solemnity of Matti Salminen’s Gurnemanz and the quite decent eloquence of Kent Nagano’s orchestra.
Profane
There are no distances to resolve in Puccini’s Tosca; the whole thing is like a lap dance. Ian Judge’s production was new in 1989 and ugly then, but there is a great Grand Guignol moment in Act 2, when Cavaradossi is being tortured offstage and the lights and shadows at the back of Scarpia’s ugly, ugly room do a dance on the walls.There’s a new Tosca, Violeta Urmana, and she’s great: tall and loud and domineering. Two years ago, she was the Kundry when Pierre Boulez did Act 2 of Parsifal with the Philharmonic, and I kept thinking of her during Linda Watson’s just-okay performance this time. Salvatore Licitra is the Cavaradossi; he’s the one who stepped in for Pavarotti’s so-called farewell appearance at the Met, with zillion-dollar seats and worldwide media. It would be nice to carry that story forward, but this is Los Angeles, not Hollywood, and Signor Licitra is, I fear, cut from ordinary cloth. Samuel Ramey’s Scarpia and Kent Nagano’s conducting are as expected.
Afloat
Down the street at REDCAT last weekend, there was Wet, the fourth opera by Anne LeBaron of the CalArts faculty, to a text by Terese Svoboda. Water is the matter at hand; not Katrina this time but pollution, scarcity and the rain forests. Evil Hal and his corporation chop down trees to free up water, which he bottles and sells worldwide. “Water is the new oil,” someone sings. Hal also finds time to impregnate most of the local girls. Eventually the world turns dry and sandy. Everybody, or almost everybody, ends up in heaven.There is plenty of attractive plotline here; as near as I could tell, LeBaron has fashioned it into strong and varied vocal stuff. I have to insert the qualifier, however, because the room at REDCAT, for all its adaptability as a performance space, is pretty much a flop as a musical theater with orchestra pit. Groans and whines from tuba, didgeridoo and pedal steel effectively overrode the sounds of lighter instruments and, worse, most of the words as well. I kept glancing upward in hopes of supertitles; none were there. (Have I become so spoiled in my old age?)LeBaron is an interesting composer; her 95-minute score has some delightful moments, some charming razzmatazz, and some strong vocal writing as well. Marc Lowenstein was the conductor, Nataki Garrett the stage director. The indestructible Jonathan Mack was the evil Hal, and a charming soprano named Ani Maldjian had a killer aria near the end. I’d like to hear the whole enterprise gathered up bodily and implanted somewhere else where I could hear what it was all about. I suspect there’s some real quality there.

Photo by Walter SchelsPianists: Two of the world’s best began and ended the Philharmonic year at Disney. For starters, Mitsuko Uchida – who does for pantsuits what Olivier used to do for Hamlet – lit magical lights through all five of the Beethoven concertos. At the end, as these words fall onto the press, the supremely imaginative young Norseman Leif Ove Andsnes comes to town to do similar service for more Beethoven, plus Mozart plus Grieg. Betweentimes, with the high adventure of the ongoing “Piano Spheres” concerts at zippy Zipper Hall, it has been a town that old man Steinway would have drooled over.Paradoxes: Management of the County Museum turned blind and deaf to the
world-famed Monday Evening Concerts on its premises, declaring that such events
— a cultural landmark actually since 1939 – will henceforth have no place within
this sacred institution. Simultaneously, a brand-new series of similarly enterprising
musical events – Jacaranda in Santa Monica – has in two years built its audience
up from scratch to near capacity, offered challenging out-of-the-way programs
including brand-new works, and made liars out of LACMA’s glib naysayers.
The Best New: It was the year of great new sets of songs greatly sung.
Peter Lieberson led the Philharmonic, with his wife Lorraine Hunt Lieberson at
his side, in a cycle he had composed for her of settings of Pablo Neruda poetry,
songs in which the love of a poet for language and a husband for a sublimely gifted
wife mingled in dark, haunting lyrics. For Dawn Upshaw (not his wife), the remarkable
Argentine/Israeli/American composer Osvaldo Golijov created Ayre, a 40-minute
cycle of mysterious texts in ancient Hispanic dialects, accompanied by throbbing
guitars and howling woodwinds that turned all of Disney Hall one night into a
place of irresistible passion. And in San Francisco there was John Adams’ Doctor
Atomic, not songs but an opera about Dr. Oppenheimer and his Bomb, in which
the most moving moments were songs indeed: of fear and conscience, as a man of
troubled morality confronts the enormity of his own inventive genius.
The Not-So-New: Composer Tan Dun seemed to come up with a new piece – in
person or on DVD – at every turn, or perhaps it was the same piece under a new
name. The Master Chorale launched his Water Passion, 90 uninterrupted minutes
consisting to large extent of sloshing, gurgling and trickling water in large
containers onstage, interspersed with text lines from the Gospel of Saint Matthew.
The lines were fine; the impact of the sloshing, on elderly prostates out in the
audience, left something to be desired and you know damn well what.
The New Toy: Once the standard Zarathustra and the Saint-Saëns Symphony
No. 3 had been disposed of, there wasn’t much left to engage the Philharmonic
and the Disney’s new pipe organ simultaneously. Out of the rubble came a Sinfonia
Concertante by one Joseph Jongen, a work of ghastly drear. Most successful:
the annual Halloween observance, this time a revival of the great old Dracula-style
silent shocker Nosferatu, with organist Clark Wilson’s own imaginative
noodling as musical counterpart.
Opera Undressed and Overdressed: Without my suggesting for a moment any
innate merits in the music itself, the Los Angeles Opera’s production of Gounod’s
Roméo et Juliette was easily the season’s best capturing of the spirit
of a hopelessly bygone work – not only for the intelligently maintained nudity
in the bedroom scene (with an extremely watchable Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón)
but for an overall “let’s get on with it” attitude rare and admirable in romantic
French opera. The next French opera, Offenbach’s Grande Duchesse, which
opened the fall season, had its spirit by contrast laid on with a heavy trowel,
its humor disastrously unfunny.
New Faces: With a minimum of pre-appearance hoopla, an unknown new conductor
turned up at the Hollywood Bowl in the season’s last couple of weeks and scored
an impressive victory over crowds and the powers that be. His name: Gustavo Dudamel,
24, from Venezuela, where he already has his own orchestra. His European career
is already under way, and the Bowl that night was crawling with talent scouts.
Rumors have it that he’ll be back next summer with his own group. Count the days.
Old New Face: Heinrich Biber, German Baroque composer of the generation
before Bach, creator of wildly virtuosic solo violin music that a Britisher named
Andrew Manze played at Disney Hall a couple of weeks ago and all but set the place
on fire. He records for Harmonia Mundi.
There’s Hope for Us Yet: In a town where great chamber music seems to be
a thing that people reminisce about around roaring fireplaces, there were actually
two wondrous performances of Beethoven’s Quartet in C Sharp Minor (Opus 131) this
season: the Penderecki Quartet at LACMA in May and the Juilliard Quartet at Disney
Hall in October. I heard them both, and have survived to tell the tale.