So I've Heard

Home Away From Home

Home, to Sir Simon Rattle, is the familiar musical repertory we most often
hear at concerts and on the radio, music from the 19th century or before, when
the tunes and the harmonies were friendly and set the mind at rest. Leaving
Home is the television series that Rattle and some friends dreamed up at
the BBC some years ago, to tell where music has gone since then. Produced in
1996, the series is now being released here on ArtHaus DVD and is, I think,
the best package of music-plus-information I have yet come across on any medium.
One of the “friends” who worked on the series, by the way, was the late Sue
Knussen, who later came here in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s education department.
Those of us who came to love her in her time here will, I think, recognize her
spirit and her remarkable level of imagination in these programs.

There are seven, each lasting 50 minutes. Rattle is at the center of each, with
his City of Birmingham Orchestra. His eyes skewer you to your seat as he talks
with spellbinding intensity about the directions that music has followed through
the 20th century. He traces the unfolding of rhythm, starting (as expected)
with the ecstatic outbursts in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring but moving
further afield toward Steve Reich’s purely rhythmic concoctions and the wild
mechanical creations of Conlon Nancarrow’s player-piano rolls. On another episode
he steers us through the dark passions of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle,
the tortured elegies of the late Shostakovich. The great Polish composer Witold
Lutoslawski is on hand to join Rattle in an explanation of his ideas on chance
music, the technique of allowing performance choices to be decided in part by
the players themselves.

One program is all about American music, a topic I entrust to British speakers
only with extreme hesitation. This one is gorgeous, however, starting with Gershwin’s
Rhapsody through the lithe curve of pianist Wayne Marshall’s playing,
and continuing on with a splendid collage of short works (Feldman, Carter, Ives,
Copland’s Appalachian Spring with Martha Graham’s first dancers, Cage,
and the smallest shard of West Side Story) set against New England autumnal
scenes of heartbreaking beauty. The whole 50 minutes becomes a tone poem about
American music, an achievement in itself.

The marvel of these programs – the three that have been released so far (by
Naxos) and the four on the way – is their extraordinary success in reaching
a level of seriousness and importance that is informative, valuable and totally
free from condescension. This is a rare happenstance. People my age were supposed
to go all weepy at the reissue, several months ago, of a large box of Leonard
Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, and those discs are
supposed to rekindle all the first things we ever learned about music, on top
of which all our future artistic wisdom has been erected. I respectfully bow
out; these programs are riddled with misinformation, glibly delivered and intended
to establish points about musical history or sonata form or what-have-you that
are simply wrong. For all the famous Lenny charm, a quality arguable at best,
I find these programs next to unwatchable. Thirty-eight years separate the first
of the Lenny series from these excellent essays by Simon Rattle and his musical
forces. Let that stand, then, as a measure of civilization’s advance in those
years.

Words, Words

What makes it great? asks Rob Kapilow about Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony,
but he leaves the question, alas, unanswered. Composer, pianist, lecturer, former
student (at 19) of the legendary Nadia Boulanger, the first-ever licensee granted
access to the words of Dr. Seuss, leader of the “What Makes It Great Players,”
Kapilow has somehow not crossed my path up to now, although I understand that
he sets up shop at the Cerritos Center now and then. His “What Makes It Great”
number on Mozart’s Symphony, issued on Vanguard’s “Everyman” Classics, is at
hand. On it he talks his way through selected passages of the “Jupiter” Symphony.
Once in a while he will identify a previously mentioned theme as “bub-bub-bup,”
so that we will know what he’s referring to. About halfway through the first
movement, just before the first appearance of one of the juiciest themes, he
gives up and moves on to the second movement. That strikes me as strange. Maybe
there wasn’t room on the disc for discussion of the whole symphony, although
the theme he leaves out is one of the things that makes the “Jupiter” Symphony
great, or so it seems to me. The point is: Discs are cheap and easy to make,
and you don’t need to have much going for you nowadays to turn out lousy product
like this. (The actual performance of the “Jupiter” on the disc is a Vanguard
recording first issued in 1960.) I understand that quite a few people buy tickets
to Rob Kapilow’s lectures, and that makes me wonder what makes him great.

You don’t need the 29 volumes of the latest Grove’s Dictionary, and you
can probably squeak by without the six volumes of the New Oxford History
of Western Music. But everybody feels kindly toward penguins these days,
and the Penguin Companion to Classical Music is by some distance the
best single-volume reference I have ever encountered. Paul Griffiths is its

Last Breaths
During the several years’ survey of the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Philharmonic has had the admirable idea of preceding each symphony with the like-numbered string quartet in a pre-concert presentation, performed by orchestra members. Those quartet performances were later repeated as part of the Philharmonic’s “Chamber Music” series. The matchup hasn’t always been exact; the pastoral gentility of the Fifth Quartet made for a curious contrast with the raucous street parades of the Fifth Symphony.

In last week’s concert, which paired the final work in each series – the harrowing death processionals of the Quartet No. 15, which unfurl in 35 minutes of near silence, and the grinning death masks of the Symphony No. 15, which usher out the composer’s last musical breaths in music of almost indescribable desolation – the match was exact and shattering. The marvelous reading of the Quartet, by orchestra members Bing Wang, Varty Manouelian, Meredith Snow and Peter Stumpf, was somewhat undermined by the sound of latecomers tromping over Disney Hall’s resonant floors; their performance will be repeated under proper concert conditions on November 29. The Symphony was flung forth under the leadership of guest conductor Andrey Boreyko, young, flamboyant chief conductor of orchestras at Hamburg and Bern, obviously headed topward.

What are we to make of this final symphony, with its strange baggage of trivial references and percussive effects from a battery of toys, nose to nose with dire Wagnerisms and those final nihilistic pages? Solomon Volkov, in his now-discredited “memoir,” has Shostakovich talking of a 15th Symphony based on Chekhov; that, we know, didn’t happen. The symphony dates from times of poor health; some of it must be a final sweeping-out of very old memories, some from childhood. However strange these digressions – most memorable, of course, the references to Rossini’s William Tell – the symphony in proper hands becomes a work of mounting power. Kurt Sanderling’s performances, here in 1988, revealed what the work was all about. Young Boreyko, I think, has captured some of that insight. Against dietitian’s orders, I remained to the concert’s end, and allowed myself to be captivated by his intense and totally thrilling unwinding of Tchaikovsky’s high-carb Romeo and Juliet. It’s nothing but lettuce and water for me now for a week.

Boreyko is also the conductor on the latest release in ECM’s ongoing service to the endlessly varied and unpredictable body of music by Arvo Pärt. Lamentate is, for once, a large-scale work for piano and orchestra – well, actually not so large-scale, since it breaks down into 10 movements, many lasting little over a minute. The inspiration is Marsyas, the imposing sculpture created by Anish Kapoor at London’s Tate Modern, which has inspired, says Pärt, “a lamento not for the dead but for the living.” That is, indeed, the mood: quiet, penetrating, with the kind of stabbing, poignant harmony you may best know from such works as Fratres. Alexei Lubimov is the pianist; both he and the conductor have mastered the composer’s unique art of causing time to stop.

Truth, Beauty, Fantasy
I don’t mean to sound obsessed with the Santa Monica concert series known as Jacaranda. (We are just good friends.) It’s just that its concerts have generally been so fine, its programs so adventuresome, the audience growth – in the handsome, small and comfortable First Presbyterian Church – has been so encouraging, and I wonder why in three years the L.A. Times has chosen to review only two of its programs.

Saturday’s program was all Schubert, including two works from his last year – the Trio in E flat and the F-minor Fantasy for piano duet – whose magnificence everybody takes on faith but that rarely turn up in live performance. Most gorgeously accoutered of all music’s elephants, the Trio crashes headlong through outer space, fearlessly chasing its own tail, endlessly and arrogantly reiterating its blustering key changes, which under some star-borne momentum actually seem to intensify in momentum and ecstasy. Jacaranda’s resident players – violinist Sarah Thornblade, cellist Tim Loo and, need one add, pianist Gloria Cheng – played as if delighted to imbibe the music’s dangerous brew. By mid-finale, by the forty-‘leventh mad Schubertian hurtle from E flat to C flat, it seemed as if all willing souls in that enchanted space “at the edge of Santa Monica” were sharing the same spell, and happy to be there.

The Fantasy, that troubled outcry that intrepid pianists (including myself in braver times) attempt at home but rarely get to hear alive in concert, stands up to the Trio as an exact opposite: terse and stern, melting only in the magical moment when the melancholy F-minor theme dissolves into a momentary wisp of F major. It was that work of Schubert, above all others, that first made me aware – as a Berkeley grad student shopping for a thesis topic – of his scope and depth. As Gloria Cheng and Steven Vanhauwaert performed it last Saturday, my own 60 years with Schubert passed by most agreeably. (We were just good friends.)

More Schubert ended the program, with utter delight: four of his choral pieces, quite nicely sung by 32 members of the Cal State Fullerton Men’s Chorus. Two of them were short and familiar, but two were special. One was Nachthelle, an ecstatic nocturne for high tenor (Shawn Thuris) and voices; the other, Nachtgesangim Walde, perched on a Wagnerian threshold, set a long, woodsy text for voices and, up in the organ loft, a quartet of French horns. Talk about your magic!?

Bravely, Uphill
Alone on a concert stage or facing an orchestra, András Schiff is
a comforting presence. He puts on no airs, nor does his music-making. Something
about his quiet, undemonstrative manner tells us that we, and his chosen music,
are in trustworthy hands. This was so last season at Disney, in his intelligent
solo performance of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. It was so again
a week ago, when he joined the Philharmonic as both soloist and conductor in
a curious program that contained nothing truly great, gathered in quite a lot
from music’s lower shelves in fact, and still ended up enjoyable –
at times even enchanting beyond expectations. This happened, I think, because
of the sense that Schiff always gives off – in concerts I have attended,
on recordings I treasure, and also on some videos that have come my way –
that he believes, profoundly and unalterably, in what he is doing. Without naming
names, I have the feeling, and so do you, that there are only a few musicians
on this planet about whom that can so easily be said.

Schiff began his program with one of the 12 Symphonies for String Orchestra
that the very young Felix Mendelssohn composed as muscle-stretching exercises.
Some of these juvenile pieces, in fact, turned out to be quite handsome, grown-up
compositions, and there are recordings to bear this out. Schiff conducted one
of the shorter of these works, No. 10 in B minor, a slow preamble leading to
a dark, beautifully formed allegro – a real discovery and, as it happened,
by some distance the best music on the program. Then came music for piano and
orchestra by Robert Schumann, not the Concerto (which I’m sure Schiff plays
marvelously) but an unfamiliar one-movement piece, the Introduction and Allegro
Appassionato. It begins like Schumann at his most romantic: rippling piano
arpeggios and a moonstruck horn solo; then it turns dramatic. It struggles ardently,
but also seems at times to self-strangle on its own gesticulations – as
if to prove to us why it doesn’t get performed very often. Still, it was
worth the hearing this once. Then, to clear the air, there came the better-known
D-major Piano Concerto of Haydn, an agreeable piece that lives on its composer’s
name without having anything much to say on its own.

More Schumann ended the concert – the “Spring” Symphony, amiable,
sometimes downright jovial (with even a triangle added to the percussion contingent,
to underscore the jollity), but with its prettiest moments hopelessly thickened
by Schumann’s orchestral ineptitude and, thus, beyond repair. Of Schumann’s
four symphonies, I find this the one with the most attractive ideas and the
clumsiest manner of setting them forth: melodic lines ruined by excessive doubling,
solo winds reduced to squalls. It makes you (or me, anyhow) want to get down
there and rescore the piece for toy instruments, or perhaps kazoo and harpsichord.
Under Schiff’s fond leadership, the music huffed and burbled nobly and
bravely along its uphill path. All that love, and the cause was lost nonetheless.
It always is.

True Brits
The sound of kazoo did not figure on last week’s superb program at Disney
by Andrew Manze and his English Concert, but harpsichord surely did – along
with theorbo and other baroque strings. Manze, who has taken over from Trevor
Pinnock as head of the “Concert” (as in “Consort,” and kindly
spare me explaining these fine points of archaic nomenclature), stands for a
new and free spirit in early-music performance, dashing and at times delightfully
unruly. A splendid pile of discs on Harmonia Mundi bears witness to his good
works. Heinrich Biber, violin virtuoso and composer from the generation before
J.S. Bach, is the new Baroque aficionados’ hero. This concert began with
five extensive Biber movements, wildly virtuosic, harmonically all over the
place. It went on to music by the better-known Biber contemporary Johann Pachelbel
– not the much-overused Canon but a ravishing Suite in minor keys. (Trivia
note: I’ll bet you didn’t know, and cannot be made to care, that Johann
had a son, Charles Pachelbel, who gave concerts in New York coffeehouses in
the 1730s and died in South Carolina.)

The result of all this passionate musical experimentation from the pre-Bach
decades, which also included a fascinating Purcell Fantasia with harmonies off
the walls, floor and ceiling, was to make the evening’s later, more familiar
music – most of all a Vivaldi cello sonata, even though elegantly performed
by Alison McGillivray – sound square and predictable. If Andrew Manze and
his explorations have finally brought the Vivaldi fetish to its well-earned
sabbatical, our gratitude will have been justly earned. At the end there was
more familiar music but unfamiliarly transformed: Bach’s B-minor Suite
“deconstructed” to a putative early version, with the solo line taken
by violin instead of the later flute. Since the violinist was Manze himself,
and his cavorting in the final Badinerie was of a level of infectiousness to
make anyone want to dance along, no blame need be reckoned or ascribed.

At Royce Hall on Sunday another welcome visitor, Britain’s Harry Bicket,
fondly remembered here for his leadership of Handel’s Giulio Cesare
with the L.A. Opera, took over the L.A. Chamber Orchestra and succeeded, with
less than a week’s rehearsal, in transforming that excellent ensemble of
players on contemporary instruments into something you could easily take for
a gathering of early-music specialists. This was done, as first violinist Margaret
Batjer explained in the pre-concert talk, simply by guiding the players to rethink
matters of pressure on the bow, and to phrase groups of consecutive notes in
a sexier-than-usual manner. The result, in a program of 18th-century music of
no particular expressive depth but enormous charm – Mozart, C.P.E. Bach
and Rameau – was ravishing. For some, the highlight was David Shostac’s
show-stealing performance of the C.P.E. Bach D-minor Flute Concerto, a work
of many notes but slender content. For me, the revelation was a work I’ve
known all my life, Mozart’s little Serenata Notturna for strings
and timpani, so beautifully phrased under Bicket’s loving baton that I
could not shake the sense that the music was talking to me in person. That’s
Mozart for you, or can be.

Two concerts, on successive nights of a recent weekend, were enough to
restore anyone’s faith in the continued strengths of our music, our music makers
and the people who make music happen. Both drew capacity, cheering crowds. I’ll
write about them in reverse chronology, according to the relative age of the music
itself.

Minimal
On the Saturday (10/22), at Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church, the treasurable series known as “Jacaranda” began its third season with a whiz-bang program of American minimalism: John Adams’ Shaker Loops in the original version for eight players in a daredevil performance without the usual safety net of a conductor; Steve Reich’s Music for Mallet Instruments; a small and, perhaps, expendable Philip Glass organ solo; and – wonder of wonders – a suite concocted out of the “knee plays” from the Glass–Robert Wilson Einstein on the Beach, the most extensive hearing of anything from that legendary, elusive bedrock masterwork to make it to these shores ever.

Imagine! Einstein on the Beach, finally here! We were doled out only 40 minutes out of 300, to be sure, and without the spaceship, the locomotive, the crazed dancers acting out the numerals, the recitation – 39 times repeated – about bathing caps and the Beach. Yet the sense of the work was somehow there, with Gail Eichenthal and Ken Page among the narrators to deliver the frenzied verbiage and with Jacaranda’s string players – Sara Parkins, Joel Pargman and Sarah Thornblade – to stand in for Dr. Einstein’s fiddling. Jacaranda’s heroic founders, master mover Patrick Scott and conductor-organist Mark Hilt, had had to move mountains to pry some of the work’s tattered manuscripts out of the publisher’s vaults. To their greater glory, this third season – seven imaginatively planned small-ensemble programs, each a connoisseur’s wet dream – began, as it deserved, with a capacity crowd. All-Schubert comes next, November 12: concert planning to die for.

Maximal
If the sense of the minimalist composers rests on a distancing of self from expression, the marvel of Osvaldo Golijov’s music, brought forward more clearly in every new major work, is a fascinating process of self-revelation of his own variegated heritage, gorgeously made clear in one work after another. Ayre – you could call it a 40-minute song cycle – compiles texts from Hispanic, Sephardic and Israeli sources with some words by Golijov himself. The passions are bitter, brutal and sardonic, often hidden behind a wash of angelic simplicity. All of this relates to Golijov’s own backgrounds – Eastern European, Israeli, Argentine, suburban Bostonian – and the enthusiasm with which he has allowed them to guide his pen. One further dimension is the extraordinary amalgam of his multifaceted expressive language with the artistic impulse of singer Dawn Upshaw, whose musical soul Golijov’s music has deepened and strengthened into one of the treasures of our time.

Upshaw’s performance of Ayre has just been released on an essential Deutsche Grammophon disc, along with Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs, a similar enterprise of a generation ago. Her singing of the Golijov at Disney Hall (10/21) had the same vocal magic; alas, the participating instrumental ensemble did not quite. Instead of the rhapsodic mania of klezmer clarinetist David Krakauer on the disc (from the ensemble Andalucian Dogs), there was the merely polite work of Michael J. Maccaferri and his colleagues from Eighth Blackbird. Instead of the marvelous Berio suite on the disc, there was more of the Blackbird repertory, a gooey conceit by a certain Derek Bermel, who is mostly memorable as an intrusive presence on otherwise memorable concerts in these parts in previous years. In fairness, I must note that guitarist Gustavo Santaolalla, from the aforementioned Andalucian Dogs, was on hand to join with Upshaw in some solo songs and perform with the ensemble, but that marvelous disc has spoiled me.

More
It had been 25 years and counting since I last heard, and was deeply challenged by, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mantra; a couple of CalArts undergrads performed it then at one of the school’s new-music festivals. It was one of the events that convinced me that California and I deserved each other, and I moved out here a year later. At this season’s first “Piano Spheres” concert (10/4), with Vicki Ray and Liam Viney at the pianos and Shaun Naidoo managing what have now become the charming, old-fashioned electronics, the piece sounded like an old friend, a predictable and beautifully worked-out set of variations with, in the final few minutes, a virtuosic scramble that old Franz Liszt would have been proud to acknowledge. There are works of Stockhausen that, in my opinion, render him certifiable; Mantra isn’t of their number. It lasts a mere 60 minutes, and deserves a place in the repertory.

On 10/17, the embattled “Monday Evening Concerts” began what might be their last stand (and might not) with the kind of off-the-wall program that did full honor to the late Dorrance Stalvey’s imagination and drew a crowd large enough to honor his memory. The phenomenal Italian bassist Stefano Scodanibbio, whom Stalvey had first brought to our midst, was on hand with works of his own that seemed to resound from far deeper than the confines of his fabulous instrument. Joining him, with even more profound resonances, was the American cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, she of the double-bow techniques, who studied with, and spreads awareness of, the Italian visionary composer Giacinto Scelsi. From his works, suspended as they are between the boundaries of familiar harmonies and, thus, outside anyone else’s kind of music, Uitti has fashioned a Trilogy of throbbing, radiant colors that seems to probe endlessly into strange, dark regions and end up in realms of beauty beyond rational criticism (as you may have noticed). And this, says an art museum’s management, has no place within its walls.

Washington’s National Symphony came to town (10/19) for the first-ever transcontinental junket in its 75 years, and with our hometown boy Leonard Slatkin in charge and the First Symphony of John Corigliano as its tastiest offering. The work has earned both the composer and Slatkin their Grammys and their international huzzahs and, as Slatkin told the audience twice at Disney (at the pre-concert talk and again from the podium), has earned more performances in its 15 years than any major work in the past whatever. It is possible to believe all that, and still find the music shallow, contrived, agonizingly protracted and, at many junctures, ugly beyond recall. So turns the world.

Still Bound

Just that teasing first chirp from the superb woodwind contingent was news good enough to start off the Philharmonic’s 87th season, its third in Disney Concert Hall, the first of its “Beethoven Unbound” series. That sound – the tricky woodwind seventh chord that starts Beethoven’s First Symphony, delightfully, in the “wrong” harmony – hung suspended in Disney’s welcoming air, a magical presence. Do people bother to notice the elegance in Beethoven’s scoring for winds? That, to these ears, has been the special pleasure so far in the orchestra’s Beethoven project, which has now reached its midpoint and will resume sometime next spring. The premise – the lordly Nine Symphonies set against music of more recent vintage – is sound enough if you don’t ponder it too hard. Fortunately, management has stopped short of trying to find truly compatible companion works to “unbind” the masterworks of yore; of the three new works so far, only one struck me as truly worthy to share a program with even Beethoven’s most rudimentary symphonic venture.

Nobody will yet claim Esa-Pekka Salonen as the eloquent friend to Beethoven’s music he may someday ripen into. His performances to date, these past few weeks and in previous seasons, have been clear-headed, conscientious and, let’s say, noncommittal. He makes all the right moves. He seats the orchestra in the “classical” formation, with the second violins to his right, which nicely underlines the marvelous interplay among the strings. His orchestral balances favor the winds, and in these weeks there have been two splendid young tryout oboists who have turned Beethoven’s frequent oboe solos into pure stardust. Salonen’s attitude toward the composer’s stipulated repeats is, however, somewhat capricious; he honored the first-movement repeats in the First, Second and Fourth symphonies, not in the “Eroica” and “Pastoral”; in the Fourth, he omitted the repeat in the final movement, turning that wondrous whirlwind into a brusque breeze. It may take a few years’ mellowing before Salonen allows the brook in the “Pastoral” to flow unimpeded in its natural bed; this past weekend’s stream was the triumph of artificial plumbing. On the positive side, I could not ask for a more seductive 10 minutes in all of the Viennese repertory than the time spent with Salonen and his glorious woodwinds in the slow movement of No. 4.

Oliver Knussen’s Violin Concerto, which came between the “Pastoral” and No. 4 this past weekend and was delivered with infectious delirium by Leila Josefowicz, is, like its composer, a likable piece of work; in that respect, at least, it formed a fit companion for those particular Beethoven symphonies. Now and then it reaches into its British ancestry, with an occasional “hey nonny nonny” as if to flash its passport; most endearing, however, is a kind of all-over-the-place athleticism. Of the previous “unbinding” works – Henri Dutilleux’s The Shadows of Time and Magnus Lindberg’s Sculpture – my memories are so negative that fairness demands further hearings before I can honestly write.

Apropos honest writing, however… the pre-concert talks for the Beethoven series
have been delivered – nay, hurled – by UCLA’s Robert Winter, who in his day held
audiences spellbound with his three-dimensional musicological discourse but seems
of late to have fallen into a fantasyland of his own fashioning. At the session
on the “Eroica,” I wandered in as Dr. Winter was leading a group sing-along in
“The Star-Spangled Banner” to demonstrate three-quarter time. A few minutes later
he produced, or so he claimed, a recording of the “Eroica” by “my friend Artur
Nikisch,” who a) died in 1922 and b) never recorded the “Eroica.”

Meanwhile . . .

The new season has burst upon us. Six other events held my attention in the past few weeks; let’s see if I can squeeze them in.

L.A. Chamber Orchestra at Royce Hall (9/25): An opening blast from Mozart’s Titus overture confirmed the sheer vitality of Jeffrey Kahane’s marvelous small orchestra. Cellist Alisa Weilerstein’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations was as good as the music needs, but boy! do that tired piece and I need a vacation from each other (after three hearings this summer).

EAR Unit at REDCAT (9/28): Our great innovative ensemble began business as usual at its new venue after being dropped at LACMA. In the usual gathering of self-indulgences and small-scale delights, Jacob Gotlib’s taut, nicely shaped contrapuntal exercise Filaments cast a particular glow in the latter category.

Terry Riley 70th Birthday Concert at Royce (10/1): I don’t often walk out of concerts early, but the lurid travesty perpetrated upon Terry’s In C by Japan’s Acid Mothers Temple (with, I’m told, Terry’s acquiescence) started a considerable exodus, in which I was not the first. Terry’s participation in his A Rainbow in Curved Air was the redeeming feature in an otherwise painful evening.

L.A. Master Chorale at Disney Hall (10/2): Francis Poulenc composed his Figure Humaine in France in 1943; ?the poetry, by the Resistance poet Paul Éluard, had been secretly circulated in occupied France during the war. The last of these choral settings is a passionate cry of pain: “On my notebook, on my desk, on each gust . . . I write your name!” In a fearsome crescendo, the rhythms and tempo continually interlocking and building over 21 stanzas, the poet struggles to write the name: LIBERTY!! And whatever you may think – whatever I have thought – about the frivolous beauty of Poulenc’s music, this final outcry on Grant Gershon’s program with his Master Chorale grabbed a capacity audience by the scruff of our collective neck and held us spellbound.

Cecilia Bartoli at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (10/10): Extraordinary, that with all the easy roads open to her to shine in the standard, even crossover, operatic fare, Bartoli has applied her awesome talent – a voice of melting, vibrant beauty, technique of pinpoint accuracy – to exploring unfamiliar, bygone Italian repertory of historical interest that nobody else seems to want to touch. Some of this material is, let’s face it, not all that great on its own. When Bartoli sang it in town the other night, with a splendid backup orchestra of early-music specialists, nobody seemed to notice.

The Juilliard Quartet at Disney Hall (10/11): The personnel has changed over the years, but the gold standard remains unalloyed; this is the quartet that knows how to prove that the late string quartets of Beethoven and the works of Elliott Carter are part of the same language. If anything, Carter Five in the Juilliard’s hands seemed to speak in gentler tones than Beethoven 131, but that was just part of the evening’s magic. Some grossly misinformed stringer in the Times has it that the Juilliard was once “brash.” That’s how a critic becomes an endangered species.

The Clouds Gather

Like the explosive “gadget” that forms its centerpiece, John Adams’ Doctor Atomic casts a blinding light upon the gloomy musical landscape. Suddenly there is something new and famous in classical music: an American opera, no less – not a rewrite of a movie script this time (as is contemporary practice among lesser souls) but a work of serious, attention-grabbing artistic stature. And if you thought that Adams might have been flirting with trouble by orchestrating Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Palestinian terrorists onto his operatic stages in his lifetime, consider that his latest foray into lands once held sacred by the likes of Mozart and Verdi terminates in a sound and a stage effect that could very well be meant to stand in for the end of the world – depicted, need I further inform you, in the brilliant, imaginative orchestral language that happens to be one of Adams’ specialties.It was appropriate, of course, for the San Francisco Opera to involve itself in a work about the conception and birth of the atomic bomb, much of whose planning took place in nearby Berkeley, where Adams himself now resides. The notion of commissioning and putting forward an opera on this level of enterprise, furthermore, reflects the mindset that made Pamela Rosenberg such a strong choice to head the company four years ago. San Francisco’s operagoers, alas, have proved not yet ready to countenance such strength. A leadership that began nobly with Messiaen’s Saint-François and ended memorably with Doctor Atomic (and embraced along the way two Handel operas in modern-dress productions, German imports that I could learn to live without) will not be soon stricken from San Francisco’s memory book.Doctor Atomic teeters precariously on a needle point of history – June
and July 1945, on the eve of the Bomb’s first test – in New Mexico at Manhattan
Project HQ in Los Alamos and at the detonation site at Alamogordo, 200 miles to
the south. Assembled around this moment of crisis are the scientists J. Robert
Oppenheimer and Edward Teller and their idealistic acolytes, facing off against
the hard-nosed military project command. Ideals and moralities do battle. Germany
has surrendered; the question resounds: Why develop so deadly a weapon merely
against Japan, which is virtually defeated anyhow? Voices offstage sound further
dissonant counterpoints: A letter from physicist Leo Szilard implores scientists
to petition President Truman against using the bomb; word comes that Enrico Fermi
is taking bets that the A-test will destroy the world’s entire atmosphere in a
chain reaction. Closer to home, an unseasonal electrical storm threatens to set
off the trial bomb (or “Gadget,” as it is known) ahead of schedule. “I demand
a signed weather forecast,” General Leslie Groves blusters at the post meteorologist,
“and if you are wrong I will hang you.” Interesting operatic material this, beside
which Adams’ Nixon in China might pass for La Traviata redux.
This Is How It Ends …
I wrote some months ago, in a different context, that the words of Peter Sellars cry out for musical setting. Here we are, then; Sellars’ libretto for Doctor Atomic constitutes a poetic and rhetorical foundation that endows its dark life even beyond musical considerations. Much of his text derives from military and scientific notes and from conversational scribblings possibly fished out of wastebaskets – chitchat, for example, about General Groves’ dieting problems. For leavening there are the human sidelights: family life among the Oppenheimers, with alcoholic Kitty drawing solace from Muriel Rukeyser poetry, Robert lost in lines from John Donne. Pasqualita, their Navajo nanny, croons her own visions. From these discordant fragments, personages take shape in the dimly lit desert landscape – and that is the genius of Sellars’ words. Subtle, anticipatory moments nudge the alert observer. One of the scientists mentions Hiroshima among possible Japanese target cities, and Adams’ orchestra gives off a meaningful groan. At the final curtain, as a chorus down front cries out its anticipation of humanity’s oncoming agony, the words of a single Japanese woman sound above the multitude.
Measured against its time and place – a major Hiroshima anniversary year, widely
observed in literature and conferences, nowhere more assiduously than in and around
the Bay Area, where so much of the thinking began – Doctor Atomic might
be easy to tag as a work of ambitious opportunism. Adams, as with his 9/11-inspired,
Pulitzer-honored On the Transmigration of Souls, has no problems in transforming
contemporary headlines into important, large-scale musical designs. The wonder
of Doctor Atomic, overriding the timelessness of its subject matter and
the intelligence in the way it has been set forth, is the deep penetration of
Adams’ music into the troubled souls of his characters. More than in any large-scale
work of his to date, I get the sense here of extraordinary mastery over a vast
spread of expressive technique, and the intelligence to summon its variety at
the proper moment. This is operatic writing in the grandest sense, the more so
for it being entirely of its own time – and ours.
Pamela Rosenberg speaks of the opera as the last in a series she has produced to reflect the Faust legend. In the Doctor Atomic of Adams/Sellars I detect more of Wagner’s Parsifal and, in their troubled genius/mystic/hero, the tortured martyr Amfortas himself. “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” cries Oppenheimer at the shattering first-act curtain under the Bomb’s menacing shadow, in the words of John Donne that had given the Bomb project the subtitle Trinity, “for I never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” Later in atomic history Oppenheimer will feel the thrust of the betrayer’s spear, as Edward Teller leads the inquisition that will bleed him of his stature among scientists. But that is matter for another opera, another time.At San Francisco’s Opera House, where I attended the third and fourth mountings of Doctor Atomic last weekend, Donald Runnicles led bone-chilling performances of Adams’ many-edged music, before not-quite-sellout audiences. Gerald Finley is the Oppenheimer; Kristine Jepson has the underwritten and arguably superfluous role of Kitty; Richard Paul Fink is Teller; and the real star, the Bomb itself, hangs over the production like some evil-eyed monster from the deep about to swallow us all. The marvelous abstractions of Lucinda Childs’ choreography take us back to her work in Einstein on the Beach, and that seems exactly right. The work needed to be heard twice; I found it the brainiest, the most challenging of Adams’ large-scale stage works, the one least subject to easy solutions. Even the final explosion, which everyone in the theater knows is coming, turns up in Adams’ music and Sellars’ staging as a splendid and imaginative backward thought. Since there are four performances left this coming week, I will say no more.

“Look, here’s a young couple back from their fellowship in Europe. They’ve
had a year of good bread, good cheese, good wine. They should be able to enjoy
those things here and for not very much money. They can’t do so at the supermarket,
with the big brands, but they can here.”

The year was 1982, and Joe Coulombe was explaining to me the philosophy behind his creation, the Trader Joe’s markets. We sat in the South Pasadena store that was the first Trader Joe’s. Shared musical passions had made us buddies back then, and Joe’s wife, Alice, would become a mover in the Los Angeles Opera League. Joe tied his marketing philosophy entirely to his grasp of demographics – all those young couples returning from European fellowships.

“I can give them a good bottle of wine for a buck,” Joe continued, “and a great cheese for two bucks a pound. In France there isn’t all this fuss about pricey, vintage wine. They just pour the stuff and drink it.”

When I arrived in Los Angeles 25 years ago, none of the expected treasure chest of new discoveries was more curious, more rewarding, than the small shack of an emporium up the block from my first rental in West L.A. It bore two names: “Pronto Market” and, just above in bolder, cruder capitals, “Trader Joe’s.” It was a food store of sorts, but those “sorts” demanded explanation. They still do. Think of food store as love object; there were people I met, in those first months in Los Angeles, who made career choices on the basis of Trader Joe’s, people who would accept or reject out-of-town job offers on the basis of whether the new location offered a T.J.’s branch nearby. It wasn’t as though access to T.J.’s offered the well-stocked life in those days; it’s somewhat better now. You couldn’t buy ordinary table salt there, only rough crystals from the Mediterranean; no paper towels or laundry soap; no Crest, but an organic toothpaste with bee propolis that didn’t taste like candy; marvelous fruit compotes from Belgium and an extraordinary range of wines priced in those days at 99 cents. No fresh-meat counter and no fresh produce – those amenities would come later. Somehow, the very selectivity of T.J.’s offerings created a fellowship among us early customers – we knew why we were there.

By the early 1960s,the San Diego–born Joseph Coulombe had bought in and
out of a drugstore chain and launched Pronto Markets, a chain of convenience stores
(“boozacola,” he called them) throughout Southern California.

“In 1971,” he recalls in a recent chat to relive old memories, “an article in Scientific American on the growing consumer market in herbal products and vitamin awareness brought about a conversion comparable to St. Paul’s on the road to Damascus, and I merged the Pronto merchandise into a line of health products, vitamins and more. Meanwhile the 7-Eleven markets had come to town from Dallas with their big bucks, and eventually Pronto got swallowed. I saw that coming, so I had opened the first Trader Joe’s, sort of on top of the Prontos, in 1967. At the same time that was happening, for several reasons, the whole idea of brand-name dominance had begun to disintegrate, so there we were at Trader Joe’s with our own brands and our own pricing and our own marketing philosophy based on our own understanding of the kind of people who come into our stores and the kind of people we hire to serve them.

“The real success of Trader Joe’s,” he continues, by now unstoppable, “is our ability to realize our demographic focus. Our ideal customer is overeducated and underpaid – music critics, for example. Another principle is that we have the highest-paid staff in the retail business. In my time we had almost no turnover. Nobody is just a cashier. Everybody works the whole store, at median income which, with benefits and bonuses, works out to $48,000.”

Coulombe sold his interest in Trader Joe’s in 1989 to a large European corporation, which has maintained the identity of the stores to a remarkable degree. Advances in packaging have made it possible to stock meats and produce that weren’t possible in 1982; there are also paper towels, for whatever reason. The chain has expanded to more than 200 stores in 19 states.

Two years ago, when I made a sentimental journey to Brookline, Massachusetts, I found a Trader Joe’s at Coolidge Corner, two blocks from the temple where I had been bar mitzvahed. The snow was packed in the parking lot; the trolley cars clanged along Beacon Street. Inside there was the sales help in Hawaiian shirts, the burritos and frozen soups in the rough wooden bins, the hand-lettered signs of my own T.J.’s back in West L.A.

“Sure,” Joe says, “Doug Rau manages our Eastern stores from New England to Minnesota. He had some questions about carrying Mexican food in Boston, or the Hawaiian shirts, but I told him not to worry, and I was right.”

Today I ask Joe, now 75, in his wonderfully light-spangled aerie high above
Pasadena’s Arroyo, about his frequent use of “I” and “we” as he talks on about
recent and current events at the chain of stores that honor his name.

“Don’t worry,” he assures me, “the old bastard is gone, dead, off the rolls. My
influence in the stores these days is absolute zero. Even so… I can’t help but
notice certain things that go a long way back. The turnover in CEOs that I hired
has been next to nil. Dan Bate of the Del Mar–and–Lake store in Pasadena lives
two blocks west from me – we just celebrated his 35th anniversary at the stores.
We talk all the time, but never about business. I spend a lot of spare time on
the boards of companies that don’t have a cutoff age limit: sporting-goods and
drugstore chains, mostly, and something called True Religion Jeans. I write a
wine column for several papers based around Pasadena. Oh yes, and I paint.”

He points proudly to tidily framed watercolors on the room’s brightly lit walls: vivid splotches, loving portraits and desert landscapes whose sharp outlines and colors Georgia O’Keeffe would not disown.

“A few years ago I found that my sight was becoming weak in one eye due to macular disintegration, so I decided to take up painting, both as a hobby and perhaps a therapy. That’s some of my work, on these walls. Not too bad, would you say?”

Photo by Dan PorgesShake
Ernest Fleischmann summoned me to lunch a few weeks ago, to share the following concern: Under no circumstances, stated Ernest in his familiar brook-no-opposition tones, was I to miss the forthcoming Hollywood Bowl engagement of the young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, the first-ever appearance in this country of a young man who is already burning a star trail across Europe and South America. Messages of this urgency from Ernest, who, in his day as Los Angeles Philharmonic honcho, introduced to local audiences (and, really, to the musical world at large) the likes of Simon Rattle and Esa-Pekka Salonen, are not to be taken lightly. Even though the Philharmonic’s own publicity machine had been notoriously reticent on the matter of the young Señor Dudamel (not a peep of a puff in the Times prior to his concert last week), and even though the Bowl in mid-September, after the opera season has opened downtown and the evenings have turned cool, begins to feel anachronistic, there was no choice but to attend this debut and share the extraordinary electricity that warmed the otherwise chilled crowd that night.Gustavo Dudamel is 24. He stands, I would guess, 5-foot-6. His features are roundish, cherubic you might say, and they are full of the music he is making, and hearing, at the moment. Seldom have I been so grateful for the Bowl’s new video system; the big screens seemed to light up with the intensity of the young musician’s involvement with his music. It was wonderful to watch, not only during the vibrant slash of Silvestre Revueltas’ La Noche de las Mayas, from a time and language familiar to Dudamel, when the earth shake of percussion and the summoning howl of the conch shell seemed to fill the Bowl to the brim with fiery, consuming energy. It happened as well during music of more artifice and greater flummery, the romantic affectations of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, with its overwrought gesticulations from an alien time and place. At his tender age, Dudamel has already mastered the crucial task that eludes many in his profession throughout their lifetimes: the power to believe in the music at hand and transfer that belief, through a responsive orchestra, to a willing audience.Dudamel was nurtured in the youth-orchestra system of Venezuela, a country that, for all its political problems, seems to know a thing or two about support for the arts. (Remember the extraordinary ensemble that came here from Caracas for Oswaldo Golijov’s Pasión in 2002?) Now he leads the Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra, which has gained the ear and admiration of Simon Rattle and will tour Europe. Dudamel himself has pulled down major conducting awards, and is listed for guest shots throughout Europe this coming season. At the Bowl concert, Dudamel’s U.S. debut, the place was crawling with management reps from orchestras far and wide. Oh, and did I mention he has signed a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon?You had to be there that night. Even after a summer of some pretty good stick-waving and a couple of moments approaching the magical – Gil Shaham’s Beethoven, Neville Marriner’s Mozart, Yo-Yo on the Silk Road – here was a night of music making that delivered a message, fortissimo: that brilliant, young talent can still emerge from anywhere on the planet, make the right moves and eventually come to matter. It could also make you wonder whether a little more well-designed pre-concert promotion, for which this major event received exactly none, might have lured a larger crowd than the mere 7,000 who came, succumbed and cheered themselves silly that night. One week before, the Times had wasted half a page of worthless hype on an event – three orchestra members as soloists in Beethoven’s wimpy “Triple” Concerto – for which any observer on Mars could have predicted the disaster that trustworthy friends informed me actually occurred.
Rattle and Role
Simon Rattle (now “Sir”) also made his L.A. Philharmonic debut at 24; our first conversation consisted mainly in his informing me that this was the worst orchestra he’d ever conducted and boasting that he still knew only one Beethoven symphony. (Times have changed.) We all noted, the other night, the similarities in the way Gustavo Dudamel gave off, in every measure, the same sense of sheer joy in his work that everyone has always noted in Rattle. You can’t fake that.Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic continue to record on EMI, and their recent two-disc set of late works by Antonin Dvorák is full of gorgeous music that you’ve probably never heard before – nor have I, at least in such gleaming presentations. These are the “folk ballads,” music composed after Dvorák’s return from his American sojourn and, thus, later in style than the “New World” Symphony. The inspiration is a set of poems, both spooky and folksy, by a minor Prague poet, dealing with witchcraft, enchantments and a magical spinning wheel. From Dvorák they elicited a more colorful orchestral language than in any of his previous works, full of shimmer and stardust, more like the naturalistic tone poems of his compatriot Smetana. There are four of these “ballads,” each lasting about 25 minutes. Their music is episodic, and there are stops and starts, but the beautiful moments are plentiful and ravishing. Some – the grandiose finale to The Golden Spinning-Wheel, for one – will make you want to stand up and sing along.Some of Rattle’s earlier recordings have been reissued on midprice EMI Classics, and you can’t go wrong – not easily, at any rate. For those whose tastes dote on the musically Brobdingnagian, Rattle’s performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalila-Symphonie ranks among the best-behaved of the many on disc. The orchestra is Rattle’s City of Birmingham Symphony, which he built to high excellence; Peter Donohoe is the pianist, and Tristan Murail masters the Ondes Martenot’s infernal electronic wails. It comes in a two-disc set with the composer’s Quartet for the End of Time, which, to my taste, is all the Messiaen a well-ordered household should require.

Marni Nixon is probably best known as the voice of Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza Doolittle in the film version of My Fair Lady. She continues her own stage career as well – most recently in a nationwide tour as Frau Schneider in Cabaret.

“Smog is the reason I don’t live in Los Angeles any more,” writes Nixon. “My children and grandchildren are now in the L.A. area; my husband wants me to move back. I could be busy with, maybe, other things besides what I do in New York, with more movies and TV. But I hate the smog.”

From time to time she receives offers of employment in Los Angeles. “I know, it always seems attached to a PR person who keeps implying that it is getting better and better, but that’s ridiculous as far as I’m concerned, and you may quote me.

“Smog affects the membranes of my throat,” she rants on. “It dries it out and makes everything hurt. I cough, and the sinuses get all messed up. Yes, I could take pills, I guess, to moisturize and deaden and coat. But it still hurts to sing when there’s smog in the air.”

There’s no question that the presence of particulate matter in the atmosphere, in whatever concentration, presents a singer – and especially a singer of classical music where exact realization of what the composer has set down on paper is of some importance – with a certain handicap. “Think of the body as a sound-producing mechanism: the generator, the vibrator and the resonator,” says David Alessi, a Beverly Hills physician with an ear-nose-throat specialty. “Any impurities that get into that chain of events along the way are going to clog the process, both the input and the output.”

The more singers you talk to, the more the impression emerges of Los Angeles as a prime booby trap for anyone who contemplates a serious vocal career. If the smog doesn’t get you, says Rhonda Dillon, who sang major roles and covered others for three years during the first run of Phantom of the Opera at the Ahmanson Theater downtown, the Santa Anas will. “Those dry winds got to me while I was still a vocal student at USC. Smog is one great enemy; the other is mucus. You choke on one, or you drown in the other. Early on, the most important thing you study is your own body.”

Natalie Limonick, the charming, smiling, white-haired woman emanating wisdom that you hear at nearly every vocal performance in the area, echoes her advice. Before your time and mine, she produced some of the best student opera performances in Southern California. “Even before you start to sing,” Limonick says, “you fortify yourself against the dangers by developing a strong speaking voice – like yours, for example. Better than anything you can take to medicate yourself – better than antihistamines, or cortisone, or Alkalol, or anything the allergists will prescribe – you work on yourself to fortify those membranes, and you have a chance against those impurities.”

No other hope? “Sure,” says David Alessi, “but it’s not very practical: maximum hydration. The more moisture you can create around yourself, the less you’ll be affected by outside impurities. That’s why people sing in the shower, after all. Surrounded by moisture, the human voice takes on a lot more resonance – men more than women. Equip our opera houses with a continual onstage water spray, and singers won’t have any problems with smog.”

More or Less

Offenbach at the L.A. Opera in the hands of Garry Marshall . . . need I go on? Doom descends even before a note is sounded, when a smarmy character, gotten up to impersonate composer Jacques Offenbach in the flesh, pops up on the podium and tries to wrestle the baton away from conductor Emmanuel Villaume. Throughout the evening’s long and exasperating attempt to present Offenbach’s La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein on the Chandler Pavilion’s uncomplaining stage, this obnoxious individual – played by the same Jason Graae who made such a pest of himself in the Merry Widow fiasco a few seasons back – skitters in and out of the production to inform us out front as to what’s going on (which we out front have been mostly, actually, trying to ignore).

I suppose I might as well give up on hope of experiencing Offenbach in the true colors of delight – the wit, the elegance, the sheer ravishment of the tenderness in a tune like the Duchess’ “Dites-lui.” Instead we have the raucous cutes of a Garry Marshall rewrite, secure in the assurance that somewhere along the line there will be a matzo joke and a joke about weapons of mass destruction. There was a time when Frederica von Stade could manage the curve of an Offenbach lyric line so as to seduce any beating heart in an audience of any size; that she could no longer do so with the music of the title character, at least on opening night, was the evening’s major sadness. (Where was Susan Graham when we needed her?)

What we got, therefore, was not Offenbach in any stylistic sense, but an oversized, overstaged laff riot with some well-conducted, gorgeous music in the background, some above-competent singing (Constance Hauman, Rod Gilfry, Paul Groves) and, overall, the sorry spectacle – not the first in L.A. Opera history – of a representative from an alien industry taking on an artistic product, not to create something innovative and interesting, but merely to insult.

The next night’s Pagliacci, first seen here in 1996, offered similar over- and underkill. The Franco Zeffirelli production seemingly involves the entire population of several Sicilian villages – although that doesn’t mitigate the fact that a whole evening of that one short opera here constitutes half of a double-bill anywhere else (at ticket prices that have now broken through the $200 mark). The Zeffirelli whoop-de-do has been restaged by Marco Gandini, still with TV sets and motorbikes mingled with antique theatrical flourishes to give a sense of no time and all time. The evening’s tragedy is the Canio of Roberto Alagna, which is utterly without tone. Nicola Luisotti’s orchestra screams its “Ridi, Pagliaccio” at the climactic moment, but over it Alagna’s pale, colorless tenor shows no emotion or motivation. His Mrs., Angela Gheorghiu, does her baby-doll Nedda quite prettily, and rises to some expression at the end, but in a lost cause.

Isolde Gets Her Man

Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is variously titled in popular parlance. It is most often spoken of simply as Tristan. Among dedicated discophiles, however, it is further identified by its female star: the “Flagstad Tristan” or, in more recent times, the “Nilsson Tristan.” Its identity might also relate to the podium; the Flagstad Tristan is no less the “Furtwängler Tristan,” with good cause. There is also a “Kleiber Tristan,” deservedly named for the remarkable performance that the legendary Carlos drew from a quite ordinary singing cast.

Now there is the much-anticipated “Domingo Tristan,” a three-CD set on EMI, which at least corrects the gender mismatch. The album notes also cite an eminently justifiable dedication to the memory of Kleiber. The image-makers have let it be rumored – although not yet officially confirmed – that this will be the last-ever operatic recording produced in a studio. Given the current state of classical recording, this is a little like announcing the end of the manufacture of dial telephones. Operatic recording, taken from live stage performances, rather than studio setup with the dramatic effects and distances artificially produced, has advanced to fair estate nowadays; if the record companies prefer to give over their Abbey Road studio time to sentimental ballad collections by the Alagnas or violin tidbits by the next doe-eyed subteen to come down the pike, theirs be the privilege.

Given access to technology that doesn’t yet exist, but may be upon us by the time these words see print, my desert-isle Tristan und Isolde would be an electronic montage assembled from individual excellences already on hand: conducted by Kleiber, with Furtwängler’s Philharmonia Orchestra playing with the eloquence it possessed in 1951. The Tristan would be Jon Vickers, with the heroism and the beauty of tone he brought to a recording led by Herbert von Karajan in the 1960s; the Isolde would, of course, be Furtwängler’s Kirsten Flagstad, still ardent and aflame in spirit in 1951 though vocally somewhat past her prime.

Lacking the means as yet to create that singular superperformance, I have no problem according shelf space to this new EMI version, to the surge and eloquence of the Royal Opera House Orchestra under Antonio Pappano, and to the abiding intelligence toward word meaning and phrase shape that has allowed the astonishing Plácido Domingo, at 63, to operate so freely and so movingly in a musical realm that he has, after all, only recently come to conquer. The Isolde is the Swedish soprano Nina Stemme, who has also taken on this killer role just recently. For now, I suppose, she will be thought of as Domingo‘s Isolde, but she is also Wagner’s: a singer of genuine power and personality, clearly embarked on a career out from anybody’s shadow. Mihoko Fujimura is the Brangaene, René Pape the King Marke; Olaf Bär manages a Kurvenal a shade less boring than anyone else you’ve ever heard in the role. The profligate casting even includes top-rank lyric tenors in walk-on roles: Ian Bostridge as the Shepherd and Rolando Villazón as the Sailor. Along with the three CDs of the complete Tristan comes a bonus, a DVD that contains the entire audio performance on – get this! – a single disc in surround sound which also shows the running text in German and a translation in your choice of English or French. O brave new gadgetry!