So I've Heard

Photo by Betty FreemanBoy Wonderful
At 35, Thomas Adès continues to surprise, delight, mystify and elude me. If I had my way, everyone on the planet would own the new EMI recording of his recent Piano Quintet, as the indisputable evidence that classical music is still being created as a manner of expression urgent, powerful and meaningful. The disc also contains Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet of 182 years before, and I would like to believe that the coupling is not accidental. Something about youth, exhilaration and a healthy disregard for set-in-stone artistic conventions bonds these two works over the two centuries that separate them chronologically. The fact that the omnipotent Adès is the pianist in both works on this indispensable disc strengthens the bond.The Adès Quintet is a single movement lasting about 20 minutes. The musical discourse – the pianist and the splendid Arditti Quartet – is spirited and seems to touch on matters of great import but with great good humor and a touch of the punster. A constant stylistic vacillation – grinding dissonance here, butter-wouldn’t-melt consonance there – forms an explosive mix. At one juncture a tangle of harsh counterpoint nears the incendiary point, and a sudden phrase of Mozart (or Brahms? or honky-tonk?) floats by to lighten the atmosphere. I admire the wisdom here, the energy. Ten years ago, with Asyla and the high-camp opera Powder Her Face, there was some fear that this new kid on the block might burn out too quickly, as Wunderkinder have been known to do. But this Quintet is a work in which bedazzlement links up with brain power. The Schubert performance (with the Belcea Quartet) is, perhaps, a shade hard-edged, but you need more than one approach to this sublime work on your shelf anyhow, and surely an Alfred Brendel or an Artur Schnabel recording can’t be that hard to find.Adès is due here next February: a two-week Philharmonic “residency” in programs that include a new violin concerto and, better yet, scenes from his opera drawn from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (which will also be done complete at Santa Fe next summer). I know the opera so far from a video and an audio from two London performances with different casts. What I have said about the Quintet goes many times over for this extraordinary score, which restores to the lyric stage an operatic setting of true literary quality: not merely continuing the lyric language from where Benjamin Britten left it at his death, but moving far onward from there toward a new expressive level.

Last Gasp
There is no long-term good news from the County Museum concerning its decision to phase out its serious musical activities. Press releases and proclamations from officials in high places continue to trumpet the tone-deaf philosophy that an art museum’s sole responsibility is to serve the visual arts, and anything else becomes mere distraction. Nobody at LACMA, apparently, seems at all aware of the broadening provided by the music at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the Chicago Art Institute (most of it free) and on down a distinguished list.LACMA’s contemporary-music programming will be the greatest loss – to the public, and to the stature of the museum itself. I have no head for public relations – a matter of some personal pride – but it strikes me as a kind of PR suicide that LACMA should be painting itself into a corner on its music policies at the same time that it’s catching all the flak for playing footsie with commercial interests on the King Tut front. At least there’s a fine interplay of ironies – and a thread of nobility as well – in the news that CalArts will now sponsor the EAR Unit residency concerts at its REDCAT Theater at the Music Center. Founded at CalArts in 1981, spun off in ’87, resident at LACMA since then, the EAR Unit has served its community as everything a living, throbbing, creative artistic pulse should be. For LACMA to self-amputate such a vital force from its own artistic center constitutes a confession of inadequacy, ignorance and incompetence I find painful to contemplate.Before his death in July, Dorrance Stalvey had planned the one last Monday Evening Concert series that LACMA has allowed him; it begins on October 17. First of all, it is a triumphant retrospective of worldwide performers whose Los Angeles debuts were at these concerts: the amazing Italian bassist Stefano Scodanibbio, the Penderecki and Parisii String Quartets, the extraordinary pianist Marino Formenti (who will end the series with a four-hour marathon “Homage”). Scodanibbio will be joined by the cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, about whom I wrote adoringly some weeks back. New York’s Continuum will play a Milton Babbitt program. The two former “resident” ensembles, XTET and the EAR Unit, have a program each. The Flux Quartet will perform Morton Feldman’s six-hour String Quartet. Pianist Sergey Schepkin will play Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations and music by Stalvey.
The Monday Evening Concerts – formerly Evenings on the Roof – flourished in many
venues, including some more congenial, before moving into LACMA’s Bing Theater
in 1961, 22 years into their history. If LACMA now chooses to disown them and
their distinguished history, LACMA’s is the loss. The lesson from the LACMA years,
notably the last three decades under Stalvey’s virtually single-handed leadership,
is that an amazing run of strong-willed, stimulating, brave concert programming
can be assembled and produced – even in a drab, unwelcoming, poorly lit,
oversize room, with no organization support, no promotion, on some nights no parking-lot
management – if somebody out front is dedicated to the proposition that it serves
the betterment of the arts. It’s hard to believe that somewhere in this community
there doesn’t exist the backup, and the locale, to continue this vital service.

To Any Lengths

Gustav Mahler has some goddamn chutzpah. Envious of my general good feelings at the evening’s start, he rams a solo trumpet into my ear to kick off his Fifth Symphony. “These are my neuroses, my Weltkvetch,” he screams at me through the agency of a zillion-member symphony orchestra, “and you will pay attention or else.” On and on he rants: one movement very sad, another movement marked “with utmost vehemence” (and, boy, does he mean it!), a third movement that has the utter gall to chew on the same indigestible wad for a good – no, make that “bad” – 20 minutes. Comes then a moment’s relaxation, a sublime, quiet slow elegy, but it’s over almost before it begins. Then comes a ludicrous finale that transforms the melody from that divine slow movement into a ludicrous travesty of itself.

Basically, I resent Mahler’s right to assume my interest in his personal hang-ups, as he pins me to my seat and hammers an endless enumeration into my long-suffering eardrums. This just might be a minority report, of course, although I won’t swear to it. Long may I argue that 75 minutes of Mahlerian Weltschmerz might not be the most appropriate entertainment for a pleasure-seeking audience on a balmy night at the Hollywood Bowl. Yet there were 6,000-plus merrymakers last Tuesday night, applauding and cheering like a bunch of sozzled hedonists, happily anchored in the opposite opinion.

Sure, the Mahler Fifth has its champions. (Even more strange to relate, so do the Sixth and the Seventh.) It starts magnificently; its opening trumpet solo could waken the dead, and is probably meant to do just that; the ensuing drum beats are like rushes of blood. The tension soon dissipates; Symphonies Two and Three also begin that way, but hold on more firmly in a grip more icy. Number Five, to these ears, is more diffuse. An hour passes, then comes the one genuine marvel, the ethereal Adagietto like a vapor trail, so brief that we virtually hear it as a double take. But the grotesque finale profanes that one tender memory; you even wonder whether Mahler himself recognized the beauty of his quiet creation.

Under Leonard Slatkin, and with the Philharmonic in reasonably responsive condition, the Fifth came across with no major commitments, no egregious sins. I do mourn the passing of the portamento in Mahler performances, the swoop from note to note in his eloquent melodic string writing, notated in the composer’s own scores and preserved in old recordings by conductors familiar with the style – Bruno Walter’s performance of the Fifth with the New York Philharmonic and a treasurable performance by Willem Mengelberg of just the Adagietto.

Leonard Bernstein’s so-called Mahler revival in the 1960s involved a certain amount
of laundry work, and one of the results was a wholesale scrubbing-out of the old
performance styles. Most of all, portamento was banished as unclean, sentimental
— feh. This attitude merely betrayed an ignorance of this important aspect
of Mahler’s expressive principles and Mahler’s own carefully detailed means of
achieving them. (As I remember, Salonen’s per-formances and recording of the Fourth
Symphony do a better job than most in honoring Mahler’s markings.) Slatkin’s performance
of the Fifth the other night was a fair example of the contemporary-bloodless
approach: very clean, very nicely detailed, with not a moment’s appeal to the
tear ducts. There was a lot more meat to be carved, in fact, from Slatkin’s nicely
controlled reading of Ives’ Three Places in New England, which began the
program, with the multiple marching bands of General Putnam’s Revolutionary Camp
nicely set apart.

Slatkin Territory

Slatkin’s presence at the Bowl, in the newly created post of principal guest conductor for the summer seasons, continues a long family connection extending back to early sound-studio days and arousing memories of wonderful chamber-music performances as well. Start with Eleanor Aller, born to Russian immigrants in New York in 1917; her grand uncle, Modest Altschuler, headed an orchestra of Russian expatriates that gave first American performances of music by Scriabin and Mussorgsky and toured with the newly arrived Rachmaninoff. The Allers – all of them musicians – immigrated to California in 1933, on word (which proved true) of employment in the studios. There Eleanor met the St. Louis–born conductor Felix Slatkin; they were married in 1939, and gave birth to the first Hollywood String Quartet (half of it, anyhow) soon thereafter. They also gave birth to Leonard and to Fred, who has gone back to the old family name of Zlotkin. Fred Zlotkin is an active freelance cellist in New York; you can hear him in the pit at the New York State Theater, and on the latest Cyndi Lauper disc, among dozens of others. He sent me an old video of the Hollywood Quartet in action. Watching Eleanor Aller playing the eye game with her three colleagues tells you everything you need to know about chamber music.

World War II brought on several personnel changes in the original Quartet. The ensemble that came together in 1945 – Slatkin and Aller, with Paul Shure and Paul Robyn in the center positions – soon became recognized as one of the great quartets of the time, the more so for the rarity of its being entirely American-formed. During my student days in Berkeley, the Hollywood Quartet’s frequent visits were a major part of my own musical discoveries. A Sunday that began with a hike on Mount Tamalpais and ended with the Hollywoods (plus guests) performing Hindemith’s Third Quartet, the Schubert C–major Quintet and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht is a memory I need very little chemical assistance in reliving.

The Hollywood String Quartet disbanded in 1959, leaving happy memories to folks of my generation and a fair number of recordings (on the Testament label – in mono, but so what?) to everybody else. They include my favorite of all versions of the Schubert Quintet (with the cellist Kurt Reher); performances of the last Beethoven Quartets so close to unsurpassable as never mind; and a disc of Kodály, Smetana and Dvorák Quartets that tells me, in a language beyond words, exactly what it means to be in love with music, and with the ability to bring it to life.

I Love Wolfgang

A recent New York Times Science section had a QA about music and emotion. “Why is it,” asked Q, “that particularly beautiful music gives me goose bumps or even makes me cry?” “It’s because,” answered A, “of a particular area called the ‘left insula,’ [which is] involved in the emotional processing of music.”

Armed with this splendid new information, I betook myself and my left insula to the all-Mozart program at the Hollywood Bowl last Tuesday, fully aware of the imminent peril to that part of my brain and the rest of my composure as well. Mozart’s (and my) old friend Sir Neville Marriner led the Philharmonic that night; the last work on the program was the Symphony No. 39. Before that had come the “Haffner” Symphony, the early (but astonishing for its time) E-flat Piano Concerto, K.271, nicely rattled off by Jonathan Biss, and a couple of concert arias yelled at by the young American soprano Marisol Montalvo. It was a poor night for audience behavior, and a worse one for Bowl restaurant caterers’ behavior – as my colleague Mark Swed noted far too amicably.

But it was Mozart 39 that redeemed the evening – came close, in fact, to making my entire summer worth the endurance. There is one particular spot in that lustrous work where I am sure to break out in goose bumps. It’s in the first movement. The low strings hold a sustained note, and the high strings meander around it. Clarinets, in heartbreaking harmony, ask a question, twice. The strings attempt an answer over a pizzicato. In perhaps a minute at a fairly leisurely tempo, we are asked to consider four, five, maybe six interlocked melodic propositions, every one of them gorgeous in a different way; only at the end of this truly amazing sequence is there time to draw a breath and sort them out. Now you know why Mozart specifies that the expositions of his first movements should be repeated. Realities at the Bowl, alas, apparently make this impractical. At least the beautifully spacious, congenial pacing of Sir Neville’s performance made this utterly marvelous symphony, the most richly orchestrated of all Mozart’s 41, come to life the first time around.

Anybody who loves Mozart at all must have a personal collection of goose-bump moments. If I tell you some of mine, it’s with the proviso that the list could change tomorrow. I don’t think I’ll ever stop waiting breathlessly, however, for the moment in The Magic Flute when Tamino and Papageno assault the Three Ladies with questions about finding Sarastro’s palace, and their answer comes with a miraculous change in the orchestra to winds and pizzicato, and the Three Genii appear overhead; it’s for moments like this that people build opera houses. I’ll never stop writing about the moment in the G-minor String Quintet when the change from B flat minor to B flat major is signaled by a high D from the first violin; to me that is the greatest single note in all music.

Then there’s that Sonata for Two Pianos, the one that some psychologists studied for its possible effect in raising students’ IQ scores. I think those findings have been fairly well debunked, which doesn’t come between the work and me in the slightest. There is a passage just before the end of the slow movement, a gradual shutdown of the melodic energy but with the most elegant pianistic decoration to speed the music on its way. More than goose bumps, that passage is the small gray Myrtle I no longer possess, rolling on her back in greeting to re-enact the ultimate act of love. In The Marriage of Figaro there is a similar moment: Susanna in the Act 3 Sextet, spinning out her slow, quiet cadenza over the massed joyousness of five other characters as – for the moment at least – her marriage to Figaro has come out from behind the clouds. And then there’s that . . .

And the Others, Too

For the Crucifixus of his B-minor Mass, J.S. Bach takes a lamenting movement from
an earlier cantata, unplugs the original German text (“Weinen, klagen…”) and
installs the Latin description of Christ’s crucifixion, ending with “sepultus
est” (“he was buried”). For those words, with the deep, dark resonance of the
middle syllable (“pul”) sung by basses, Bach gives the harmony a wrench, and this
is something you cannot hear (or I cannot and you should not) without the fuzz
between your shoulders going rigid. Is Bach trying to tell us something about
the emotional pull of the sudden modulation, nearly a century before Schubert
and the Romantics? I don’t know, but there is a particular song by Schubert, one
of the hundreds, that affects me in exactly the same way: the haunting, small
“Nacht und Träume,” a quiet, moonlit nocturne in which, again, the harmony just
suddenly drops – and so do we. And then you cannot leave Schubert without sharing
the emotional scars from his own last weeks on Earth: the tortured flicker that
ends the slow movement of the String Quintet, or the astonishing key changes midway
in the final Piano Sonata, when C sharp becomes C natural out of sheer defiance
and the music flames hot.

It’s the heat of defiance that reaches me the most profoundly in Beethoven’s music,
too: the trumpet that shrieks midway in the “Eroica”’s Funeral March, the horns
on their high E all the way through the Seventh Symphony, all four string players
in the bloodbath that is the Grosse Fuge. But there is one work of Beethoven
that raises goose bumps especially high, and I think something I wrote about it
five years ago belongs here.

“Beethoven’s first theme is its own kind of miracle. It crashes in on you, out of the mists of uncertainty, like the Titanic‘s iceberg, massive and gruff. Later, it splits apart in wondrous ways: now haunting and melancholy, now a horn solo like a distant benediction. Midway in the first movement, its fragments knock against one another and, with terrific energy, coalesce once more in a recapitulation both sardonic and triumphant. The interweave of counterpoints – close at hand, in the middle distance and afar – is staggering; time and again you have to remind yourself that all this incredible detail is the fashioning of a mortal totally and tragically deaf. At the movement’s end, Beethoven’s incomparable theme pulls itself once more out of a mumbling, eerie blackness and flings itself against us, against the gods.”

Well, I just checked out the first movement of the Beethoven Ninth against the left insula, and the goose bumps still work.

Infinite Variety

Even if he weren’t one of the finest performers on his chosen instrument anywhere in today’s musical world, Yo-Yo Ma would stand apart. Fame rests upon his shoulders as a benevolent aura. His recent appearance at the Hollywood Bowl, not so much at the head of his Silk Road Ensemble but in its midst, drew a sellout crowd of more than 17,000. He did not, that night, thrill the crowd – as he sometimes does – with a show of personal virtuosity in a cello concerto by Dvorák or Schumann, which he plays as well as anyone on Earth. He participated, instead, as a member of an ensemble performing interesting music in styles colored by influences from world sources – Asian, African, Eastern-European – in which he took brief solos on his cello or on other instruments of more exotic design. All evening, in other words, he functioned as one of many.

The more than 17,000 people who had shown their continued delight that night had come, from what I could glean from conversations around me, to spend the evening with the friend they had known for many years, from his appearances on Sesame Street or with Mr. Rogers. They knew their friend Yo-Yo because years ago he had shown them how it was possible to be a nice guy as well as a wonderful musician. Anyone contemplating a career in the performing arts – or in anything else, for that matter, for which becoming famous might be a helpful ingredient – would do well to study the example of Yo-Yo Ma.

Yo-Yo formed the Silk Road Ensemble at Tanglewood in 2000, an open-ended consortium of musicians from the various cultures along the famous old trade route between China and the West, with the intent of reviving past musical cultures or re-creating contemporary imitations of their stylistic outlines. The group first visited here, at Royce Hall, in 2002, and I found the concert “curiously unsatisfying, a smorgasbord of tidy but blandly spiced dishes.” Either I or the Ensemble – maybe both – have changed over three years because the concert at the Bowl last week was satisfying, and occasionally thrilling. There was a kind of eloquence in the seven, long-listed works, and even in the dazzling encores, in which echoes in a time warp – a cascade of fast plucked notes from Wu Man’s pipa, a virtuoso vocal cadenza by supersinger Ganbaatar Khongorzul, a mournful cantilena from Yo-Yo’s cello, or from an ancient cello-like instrument of similar shape – seemed to hang suspended in time, belonging to both past and present.

I don’t know where any of this is heading, this music that defies boundaries or
definition; must I? This was a concert of serious, very beautiful, sometimes extremely
exciting music, and perhaps that’s all the definition we need to restart the troubled
performing arts. Incidentally, in the same review from 2002 in which I deplored
the earlier version of Silk Road, I delivered something of a rave for Tan Dun’s
Water Passion, which had just come out on a Sony recording. Now I can’t
stand the work. Plus ça change…

Opera by Template

Within five days, September 15–19, 2003, the infamous mad monk Rasputin trod the stage in opera houses on both sides of the planet. In Los Angeles – as I am sure you’d prefer to forget – there was Deborah Drattell’s Nicholas and Alexandra with Plácido Domingo himself self-cast as the flamboyant charlatan. At the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki, Matti Salminen took on the title role in Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Rasputin. That opera, recorded and televised at the world premiere, is now at hand on an Ondine DVD. You don’t need me to tell you which is the better of the two operas, but I can tell you by how much.

Rautavaara (born in 1928 and, by the way, in Finnish you have to pronounce every vowel separately, so leave yourself plenty of time) studied for a time in the U.S. with Copland, Persichetti and Sessions. He belongs to a group of Finnish neoromantics, all of them prolific and well supported at home, who have created a respectable native rep-ertory. Aulis Sallinen, whose Kullervo was per-formed here in 1992, is probably the best known.

There is nothing wrong with Rasputin; up against Drattell’s opera, you can take this as high praise. Everything that happens in the opera is exactly what you’d expect to happen. The orchestration is big, romantic and dark. Rasputin’s first long aria, in which he asserts his power and informs the assembled Russian royalty of how indispensable he intends to be to the continued health of the empire, is a marvelous showpiece, and Salminen dines on it most lavishly. (He’ll be the Gurnemanz in the L.A. Opera’s upcoming Parsifal.) Jorma Hynninen is Tsar Nicholas; Lilli Paasikivi is his Tsarina. Mikko Franck, who made his local debut last season at Disney Hall leading Shosta-kovich’s Twelfth Symphony, but took ill after one performance (wouldn’t you?), is the conductor.

Dark and handsome (I won’t bother you with any more vowels to chew on) in Helsinki’s marvelous new house, Rasputin strikes me altogether as the personification of an operatic dead end. No, perhaps “per-sonification” is wrong; come to think of it, somewhere behind the excellent work of the human cast and orchestra and the intelligence of the stage director and designers, the impeccable turning of some kind of operatic machine is faintly, but clearly, heard.

And suddenly the inferiority of Drattell’s opera doesn’t seem so bad. At least its incompetence was the work of human hands.

Waist Not, Want Not

I may have the measurements slightly off here, but it seems to me that Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and the Hollywood Bowl are artworks of about the same size, and were actually made for one another. Both are eminently satisfying, with few demands on the thinking apparatus, to large groups of people (more than 6,000 last Thursday night). Both actually take on an enhanced luster when their proponents display small and forgivable human flaws. When Olga Kern joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic to dish out the work at the Bowl last week, she hit a couple of clinkers as early as in the famous introductory passage, and somehow I felt myself in the presence of a friend. My first-ever recording of the Concerto was by Artur Rubinstein (back when he spelled his first name without the “h”) on Victor M-180, and at the start of the last movement Rubinstein hits a great, gleaming clinker that will, forever, be embedded in my view of the work. (The recording is still available, on an RCA reissue; John Barbirolli conducts.) Any performance that fails to include that particular fistful of wrong notes is, for me, foredoomed. To that extent (but to no others) Ms. Kern’s performance was a letdown.

In truth, Ms. Kern – recent winner of the famous (did someone whisper “notorious”?) Van Cliburn Piano Competition down Texas way – played the bejesus out of Tchaikovsky’s lame-brained concoction, and the Philharmonic, under its bright young assistant conductor Alexander Mickelthwate, followed her along every misguided note of Tchaikovsky’s vulgar trajectory. Actually, the splendiferously endowed young Russian-born pianist, string bean–svelte and blond as if to challenge the sheen of Fort Knox’s gold, provided two performances of the concerto at once: one to manage the rise and fall of the music’s virtuosic ambitions, and another to justify the presence of the Bowl’s video screens, as few performances I have seen up in that Cahuenga Pass venue ever have. It would not surprise me to learn that she had carefully studied her repertory of facial expressions from the back pages of the publication you now hold; lucky for the riot police she didn’t include the phone numbers as well.

Filling out the program, and returning it to the realm of serious musical consideration, young (36) Mickelthwate took on the Berlioz Fantastique Symphony under handicaps not of his making. First was the venue. If ever a single work has demonstrated the acoustic marvels of the Disney Concert Hall it has been this, which Esa-Pekka Salonen has conducted in both seasons so far. Second, of course, was Salonen’s performance itself, a probing by a modern-day orchestral master of the extraordinary sound panorama in this one-of-a-kind creation from the past.

Up against these memories, and with some interesting new competition at the Bowl from squabbling coyotes up on the hill and gabbling newly hatched wildfowl somewhere high up in the stage mechanism, Mickelthwate’s performance, if not truly “fantastic,” was a good deal more than merely creditable. He makes friends with the audience in a manner pleasant and unstrained; as befits his German upbringing, once he reaches the podium he is all business. He has a strong, clear beat, and a stage presence agreeably free from choreography. I could have wished that he had taken the repeats in the first and last two movements; they actually give the work shape and logic, as the Salonen performances have proved. The second-movement Waltz did not quite dance, but the enchantment of the third-movement Pastoral was beautifully captured. Keep your eye on Mickelthwate; he has the goods. Next season he conducts in a couple of “Green Umbrella” concerts and a Christmas program, but he needs to be thrown a symphony or two.

Serendipity

The Bruman Concerts at UCLA, which I had only discovered two weeks ago, came to an end for this summer with the fine young Calder Quartet nearly filling the hall. Christopher Rouse’s Second Quartet was the tough new work: strong, shapely and quite eloquent. Rouse began his career with music in an aggressive, pin-’em-to-the-seat style that didn’t have much to tell me beyond sheer impact. This quartet is something different; I found its ending, a long, quiet chorale, exceptionally beautiful. The work dates from 1988; Rouse later transcribed it for string orchestra (Concerto per Corde) and it has been recorded in that form, but the chamber version also deserves circulation. Smetana’s E-minor Quartet (“From My Life”) ended the program: wonderful, robust music that used to be performed more often than it is today. The Calder guys have moved up quickly – with residencies currently at both the Colburn and Juilliard schools – and I suspect that they haven’t yet learned to relax into the fun of this kind of middle-European repertory. Neither the dancing nor, at the end, the dark tragedy of this bucolic masterpiece came completely alive on the stage at Korn Hall; the marvelous scenery and colors beyond the notes remained unexplored.

Downtown at California Plaza (next to MOCA) there are “Grand Performances” so-called,
a variorum of free musical entertainments set up in that charming watery environment
of fountains and lagoons just in from Grand Avenue. On Saturday night there was
the Mládí Chamber Orchestra, this time in full force. Through the wretched microphoning
and overwrought amplification, and in a locale directly under a much-used commercial
flight route, an outlay of imagination could still discern that this gathering
of local freelancers, which functions without a conductor and gives concerts in
several locales during the season, is an elegant and well-trained – and, therefore,
valuable – small orchestra. Saturday’s concert began with an early Haydn symphony
— No. 7, “Le Midi” – and moved on to the pallid charms of Tchaikovsky’s “Rococo”
Variations, with cellist Timothy Loo excellently maintaining the music’s modest
semblance of momentum. Following intermission came the gut-wrenching Chamber Symphony
of Shostakovich, music written in horror at the composer’s first view of war-bombed
Dresden. When I tell you that the ending of this wonderful work was allowed to
segue directly into recorded pop music to send the crowd home happy, you may ask
whether the management of this music series is worthy of trust to produce classical
music on Grand or any other avenue in town. So do I.

Photo by Jim ArndtFinished Symphonies
Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony, on at the Hollywood Bowl last week, was the most significant out-of-the-way music in this summer’s Bowl programming. It dates from a time when the notion of the Great American Symphony was taken as a cultural imperative: the triumphant assertion of this country’s ordained place in the cultural firmament. Never mind that an American cultural identity had by 1945 already nailed down its place in that firmament, and Copland had done his part along with others – Gershwin, Thomson, Ellington, you-name-’em – in inventing a serious musical language. Still, there was something magic about “symphony”; it implied the privilege of sitting with the grownups, membership in an international club. And so we got symphonies: grandiose extended works by America’s first symphonic generation. Roy Harris, William Schuman, Roger Sessions, David Diamond, Walter Piston and their lesser colleagues wrote symphonies by the basketful. Conductors of the day, most of all Boston’s eager-eyed Serge Koussevitzky and his acolyte Leonard Bernstein, introduced each work as “the greatest since Brahms.” Copland had the good sense to stop at No. 3. (His first two, actually, came early in his career, his lively experimental days; he really only contributed the one to the basket.)While it might be taken as bad manners to generalize over so considerable an output of music that has kept so many orchestral musicians employed and recorded over half a century – and enabled minor figures like Seattle Symphony conductor Gerard Schwarz to carve a niche for themselves as champions of America’s symphonic glory – I am obliged to insert my own small voice right about here and suggest that the Great American Symphony still remains uncomposed, and rightly so. Do we live in hope? I don’t see why we should; there are better ways for today’s composers to occupy themselves than engaging the symphonic chimera, and better names for the results. (In case anyone asks, I consider the Second Symphony of Roger Sessions the least disastrous American symphony so far.)The Copland Third received a strong performance under the Eugene Symphony’s Giancarlo Guerrero. From his credentials I gather that he devotes a fair amount of time in Eugene to new American music, and the more power to him. But the Copland is, to me, beyond salvation. Its first two movements force bland, formulaic music into “symphonic” attitudes they do not fit: development, variation, repetition. The second movement has some of Copland’s fine jiggety-jog, but again forced into repetitive symphonic patterns; a few cowboys or Appalachian settlers whoopin’ across the stage would help. The slow movement is deadly dull and morose, and the finale gains somewhat by its inclusion of the famous “Fanfare for the Common Man,” although the peroration strikes me as cheap. Overall, I cannot see Copland’s motivation for cantilevering any of this material out to symphonic length. The symphony runs nearly 45 minutes, the longest of his orchestral works and the most diffuse. The two by Tchaikovsky that began the program – the Romeo and Juliet, and the Rococo Variations with the young Johannes Moser, the mettlesome cello soloist – made their musical points far more tidily than the lumbering behemoth of a pseudosymphony that ensued.Mom, Pop, Uncle George and Bill
Bridge Records is a small mom-‘n’-pop company up the Hudson from New York, run by guitarist David Starobin and wife Becky, and one of its missions is to create a complete recording of the music of grand old George Crumb. The ninth disc, now at hand, includes music that stood as a landmark – in my generation at least and, I’m sure, others – for its revelation of the far boundaries of “classical” music, and for how little those boundaries really mattered anymore. Ancient Voices of Children was a piece like no other, drawing on known poetic sources (the dark lyrics of Garcia Lorca) but set, with remarkable freedom, to musical resources beyond definition: a boy soprano, a percussionist using tuned stones, a musical saw. Its time was the start of the Solid ’70s, but here was music beyond time, existing untethered in pure air, and even beckoning to us to join. On the original LP with Jan DeGaetani among the singers, the work turned the Nonesuch label into a generational imperative. I had smoked my first joint shortly before Ancient Voices came around. The disc has made it possible to repeat the experience anytime, straight. It was the first head music respectable enough to appear on a concert stage. (Crumb’s Black Angels, from the same era, was the second.)The new recording comes 35 years too late to revisit upon civilization exactly the same impact, but the music is there still, and the aura remains as well. Tony Arnold is the soprano, Justin Murray the boy soprano; David Colson leads the marvelously heterogeneous ensemble. There are further treasures: four sets of Garcia Lorca settings (Madrigals) for soprano and ensemble, and, I happily report, the EineKleine Mitternachtmusik (A Little Midnight Music), Crumb’s extended set of the “ruminations” – not quite improv, in other words – on Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight” that we heard during last season’s Pacific Symphony Crumbfest in Costa Mesa.William Bolcom has seven symphonies to his name, but the world knows him better
for his vocal music – the operas, which have triumphed at the Chicago Lyric and
Met, and the great cycle of William Blake poems Songs of Innocence and of Experience,
which the Pacific Symphony gave us two years ago and which has now been recorded
on Naxos. Now, again on Naxos, there is a glorious collection of solo songs: pieces
from his off-Broadway musicals, children’s songs and a cycle of American women’s
poems. As with the Blake cycle, the amazement here is in the variety of Bolcom’s
music, from the most endearing childlike charm to a song called “The Last Days
of Mankind” wherein you’d swear that the ghosts of Kurt Weill and Bert Brecht
were again abroad in the land with heavy tread. The powerhouse singer is Carole
Farley, whom I have admired as Berg’s Lulu; Bolcom himself takes charge of his
complex, nicely shaded piano collaborations. The disc begins with a lumbar-leveling
scream, and goes onward and upward from there.

Donkey’s Ears

Every year around this time I start keeping a yellow pad close at hand, to jot down all the reasons why classical music at the Hollywood Bowl is a totally unworkable proposition. The list is long and sad; it should be familiar by now. Most of it dates back to Bernheimer days. Some items on the list seem to come and go. The concerts two weeks ago, for example, deluded me into believing that the sound engineers had beaten back the echo problem that had been so annoying last year. Not so; last week’s Beethoven program, with those quick, sharp sforzandos that stand out in Ludwig’s musical signature, restored that particular bugaboo in full glory. The Bowl endures, warts ‘n’ all.
But then there are the times when those warts impart to the joys (and perhaps even the sorrows) of Bowl-going a radiance of their own; you have to realize that there is nothing just like this cultural phenomenon anywhere else in the land, and that it is our great good fortune to have it among us. Take the aforementioned Beethoven program, an event that, though it promised modestly on paper, I still cannot get out of my ears in the actuality. To begin, the weather gods were all enthroned that night; it was one of those sublime, calm, 70-ish nights when the 6 o’clock news is full of Texas hurricanes and East Coast heat waves but the local air offers naught but benevolence. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, music that I have often found somewhat soft-spined and lacking in point of view in indoor concerts, a pretty but inactive piece more endurable than adorable, sounded on that night no less miracle-strewn than the surrounding air: smiling and caressing. The special marvel of Beethoven’s orchestral language in this particular work – the way, for example, that he bends his violin solos around the first bassoon in notable passages in all three movements – stood out like a newly fashioned stripe on an audible rainbow. The most magical of all its episodes – the hushed G-minor rhapsody in the first movement, when the violin soars heavenward with a newly fashioned variant of the main theme, accompanied far below with the timpani’s insistent throbbing of the movement’s principal rhythmic motif – was transformed that night into irresistible messages from some distant galaxy. And that power, friends, to convert the musically ordinary into the celestially extraordinary merely through the phenomenon of atmosphere, is reason enough to keep up attendance at the Hollywood Bowl.
Gil Shaham was the soloist, with Jeffrey Tate the evening’s conductor. Born in Illinois, raised in Israel, Shaham has earned most of his following so far through his service to the flashy, romantic side of the repertory. Moving on toward Beethoven seems, therefore, like a step upward. I heard his effort as honest, dedicated and intelligent – the foundation, in other words, of what may turn into an important statement on Beethoven’s quiet not-quite-masterwork, but not there yet.
Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony rounded out the program, with Tate observing all the composer’s specified repeats – a rarity at the Bowl. I found this a strong, beautifully shaped rendition, with special care lavished once again upon Beethoven’s remarkable wind scoring. I struggle somewhat to visualize the shape of the donkey’s ears through which the junior critic on the Times apparently heard the performance, with the quiet, melancholic allegretto turned into a “funeral march.”
My Fair Mládí

Musical pickings are sparse during the summer months, but rewards await the ardent serendipiter. Two days after the Bowl’s Beethoven, I happened upon an eminently satisfying chamber-music concert in a UCLA lecture hall, and was glad I did. The players were five members of Mládí, the ensemble whose wintertime programs in an old apartment building near Silver Lake I have also found reason to praise. The setting, Korn Convocation Hall at the Anderson School, is your basic drab lecture room, but the sound is warm and welcoming. There are five concerts every summer, endowed by and named after Henry J. Bruman, a UCLA professor who liked the idea of making music available, and admission is free.
The Bruman concerts are solid, interesting and challenging. Last week’s program consisted of four new or newish works for winds. One, a perky and thoroughly delightful duet for flute and oboe by the local composer Alex Shapiro, was brand-new, and Shapiro was on hand to deliver a few words about her piece. The final work, the Six Bagatelles by György Ligeti, is the kind of energy-packed music, novel and adventurous at every turn, that you keep on hand to play for people who tell you that contemporary music isn’t worth the ink it takes to print it. The hall at UCLA seats about 600 at a guess, and it was comfortably filled. Most of the audience were on the gray side, the kind of people who’d have the time for a concert on a Monday or a Thursday afternoon, and they seemed thoroughly pleased with the kind of programming these concerts tend to offer. I bring this up in relation to the fear that seems to stalk the land – concerning LACMA’s “Sundays Live” concerts and their broadcast sponsor, for example – when the matter of unfamiliar or contemporary music comes up.
There are three more Bruman concerts: July 28, August 1 and August 4, with the superb Calder Quartet on hand for the last of these. Don’t tell me that nothing happens out here in the summer.

Ringlets

They knew how to do things then. Opening night, 1938, at the Hollywood Bowl consisted
of nothing less than Wagner’s Die Walküre, four hours plus, with Valkyries
on horseback careening down the verdant nearby hills. The legendary Maria Jeritza
was the Brünnhilde; Richard Hageman, better known for such salon tearjerkers as
“Do Not Go, My Love,” was on the podium. National and international celebrities
attended, or so the press gushingly reported.

Nowadays we get our Wagner one act at a time, indoors and out. The Philharmonic
gave us Tristan und Isolde over three nights (with three admissions) this
past season, and a single act of Die Götterdämmerung served to light up
the sky as the Bowl’s first serious-music event earlier this month. (Okay, so
an 80-minute single Wagnerian act runs the same as the whole of La Bohème.
Even so…) And now news is at hand that the first-ever local production of all
four parts of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, the grandiose 18-hour artwork
that keeps getting promised and postponed and promised again by the Los Angeles
Opera, is slated to sneak in instead under the auspices of the Long Beach Opera
for two performances next January. The four operas will be performed – get this
— over two days, each opera running anywhere from two to three hours, in English
in the 820-seat Center Theater. On top of this comes news that the Metropolitan
Opera is planning a new “family version” of its current production of Mozart’s
Magic Flute, to run 90 minutes instead of the usual three hours. No word
has come from the Met as to whether ticket prices will be adjusted accordingly.
Wanna bet?

John Mauceri conducted the Götterdämmerung at the Bowl; no Wagnerian slouch, he had led a respectable Walküre at Opera Pacific during that company’s more adventurous days. He also delivered an authoritative and delightful exegesis on the whole tangled Ring plot that almost, if not quite, atoned for the lack of supertitles. This was, surprisingly enough, Mauceri’s first time on the Philharmonic podium in 25 years.

Christine Brewer, the Philharmonic’s Isolde last December, moves on rapidly toward Wagnerian eminence. Her Brünnhilde, even through microphones, had its own thrilling impact, defiant and, at the end, richly human. Christian Franz, the Siegfried, and Christine Goerke, the Gutrune, were forged from lesser metal but not by much; Kurt Rydl, whose wobble had lent a nice comic edge to his Ochs in the L.A. Opera’s recent Rosenkavalier, put it to far less admirable service as the villainous Hagen this time around.

Some work has obviously been done on the Bowl’s sound system over the down time. The absurd echo has been vanquished or substantially reduced; the sound, from a point halfway back, is at least as true-to-life as, say, an early LP. The video screens still strike me as wasted expense, but perhaps I’m missing some of the pop-oriented entertainment that fills them on the weekend concerts. The coordination between the camera shots and the people actually performing at any moment is no better than last year; it can’t be without an enormous budget for extra rehearsals, and I’m still not convinced that all that many people go to the Bowl to watch TV screens. You’d think that at least there’d be a way of getting the texts for vocal works up on the screen, but that might also be wasted effort for the benefit of few. At least the short bursts of Magic Fire – live, at center stage – as Valhalla and its neighborhood went up in flames at the grand Wagnerian finale, provided the evening’s visual reward for those among the fast-dwindling crowd who had stuck out those 80 minutes to the end.

By George

Two nights later there was Gershwin: not the master of Broadway sass whom we all
rightly adore, but the aspirant to a place among the Higher Artists whose aspirations
merit a raised eyebrow or two. The Piano Concerto in F, from which Jean-Yves Thibaudet
extracted the ultimate measure of razzle-dazzle on this occasion (with proper
support from conductor Leonard Slatkin and the Philharmonic), is my case in point
— a head-on collision between high-flying creative ambition and a woeful inability
to make anything work from one minute to the next. Any single musical notion is
uncommonly attractive, and their variety is vast: the veritable torrent of syncopated
flourishes that begin the work, the curious lapse into a kind of static Charleston
rhythm that stops everything a few minutes later, the lovely blues tune for solo
trumpet that begins the slow movement, the pseudo-Yiddish kvetch that takes over
midway in that movement. But what is there in this music that holds us by the
collarbone and renders thrilling the progression from idea to idea? This question
seems beyond Gershwin’s power, or his interest, to resolve; we are left, in the
perceptive words of Paul Rosenfeld, one of the few American critics to resist
the inevitability of the “Great American Composer” bandwagon in Gershwin’s case,
with “a heap of extremely heterogeneous minor forms and expressions.”

Curiously, the same program also included a shorter and less-known Gershwin piece also for piano and orchestra, his Variations on “I Got Rhythm,” in which I sensed the presence of a real and serious composer, genuinely in charge of his material and aware of where he wants to take it. The form of the piece, a series of compositional essays on a single (and singularly great) tune, prevents its wandering afield, and the permutations devised by Gershwin over its 10-or-so-minute span are the work of a genuine smart-ass.

The program ended with Gershwin’s An American in Paris, a piece whose cleverness
I usually find endearing and surely would have this time. But I was out of sorts
by then; one large chunk of inferior Gershwin and two monumentally undistinguished
pieces by Gershwinoids Ferde Grofé and Robert Russell Bennett disinclined me to
inflict my state of mind on anything else that evening.

Dorrance Stalvey, who single-handedly planned,
directed and managed the Monday Evening
Concerts at L.A. County Museum of
Art since 1971, died Sunday at 75,
after a yearlong illness, while the
following words were being written. His
passing, while not unexpected, takes from
our midst a genuine musical hero we
can ill afford to spare. It’s now
all the more urgent that the shameful
situation described in my article —
and “shameful” is the exact word that
comes to mind — not be allowed
to stand.

–A.R.

Double Talk

As I had hoped, a number of pens (or word processors) have been active over
the past few months in response to the actions by the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art in drastically curtailing its music programming. Nothing has yet been
amended from LACMA’s original announcement. The Residency Concerts – the EAR
Unit and XTET series and the Rosalinde Gilbert Chamber Concerts – have been
canceled as of now; the Monday Evening Concerts, the crown jewels of the museum’s
musical activities, have been granted one more year of existence. The free concerts
– jazz on Friday afternoons and the Sunday Live concerts by young musicians
– will continue, at least for now.

Some of the correspondence from LACMA officials to the protesters has been circulated
by recipients, and it makes for depressing reading. Let us you and I, for example,
take one paragraph from a recent letter to a well-known and distinguished arts
patron, and read it together. It is dated June 16, and comes from one Bruce
Robertson, who is the deputy director of art programs at LACMA and the chief
curator of its Center for the Art of the Americas. “Over the last decade or
more,” Mr. Robertson begins, “we have been very proud that LACMA’s classical-music
programs have consistently won awards for their quality.” No argument so far.

“At the same time,” Mr. Robertson continues, “we have noticed declining audiences
and a real divergence between the programs and audiences and our art programs
and membership.” May I suggest, as I did in a letter of my own to Mr. Robertson,
that the fact that many of the LACMA concerts have drawn small audiences is
not at times the fault of the music, but the fault of LACMA itself for obliging
its concerts to exist with zero publicity support: not a penny’s worth of advertising
budget. Perhaps if Mr. Robertson had looked in on these concerts himself, he
might have noticed – to cite one instance of many – the interesting tie-in a
couple of years ago between the “Made in Los Angeles” concert series and the
similar exhibition at the museum. The museum exhibits were lavishly promoted;
the concerts, not at all. Divergence?

Mr. Robertson goes on: “We feel that the musical landscape of Los Angeles is
changing and that what LACMA needed to do 20 years ago, when we started developing
our current classical musical programs, is not what we need to do now . . .”
Yes, the musical landscape is changing, and a great deal of the credit for this
goes to the progressive musical forces in the area: the Philharmonic, CalArts
and the Monday Evening and Residency concerts at LACMA. The significance of
the LACMA programs isn’t the matter of the small houses, but the power of word
of mouth that has, on many occasions, counteracted LACMA’s do-nothing policy
in this regard. Take just three of many examples: the Arditti Quartet, the bassist
Stefano Scodanibbio, the pianist Marino Formenti. All three made their local
debuts at LACMA with pathetically small houses; all drew near-sellout crowds
from then on. With just minimal support from LACMA’s publicists, that phenomenon
might have been repeated on a regular basis. For a LACMA spokesperson to blame
audience drop-off on changing tastes, at a time when critics worldwide write
enviously about Los Angeles’ musical progress, liberally citing the LACMA concerts
along the way, suggests that either Mr. Robertson and his office mates have
no conception of today’s musical world, or that they don’t want to know.

They even seem to believe that their “core mission, of serving the public through
making the visual arts available to them,” can somehow function in silence,
setting aside a unity of the arts on which civilization has rested for several
millennia. Somehow it doesn’t strike me that free Friday jazz is going to go
very far in piercing that silence. Nor will the free Sunday Live concerts, since
their broadcast medium, KMZT-FM, does so with the stipulation that they include
no “difficult” (i.e., contemporary) music. The condition of music, which all
the arts were once wisely said to approach, seems ever more distant.

That You, Ludwig?

It’s a sunny Viennese morning in the summer of 1804. The musicians gather at
the Lobkowitz Palace, dressed in livery but with hairstyling of two centuries
later. Beethoven shows up, a large bundle of musical scores under his arm, cleanly
notated despite what we know of his penmanship. He looks a lot like the several
W.B. Mähler paintings of the real 34-year-old Beethoven, including the famous
scowl, but he is actually the actor Ian Hart. The musicians gather for their
first-ever reading of Beethoven’s new symphony, a huge new work in E flat; there
are complaints about the length, about the rhythms; there is small talk about
whether the symphony is to be dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte or simply titled
“Eroica.”

The audience arrives, a gathering of invited nobles including a sourpuss named
Count Dietrichstein. He is obviously the Martin Bernheimer of his day, prepared
to despise the new symphony before he hears a note and equally prepared to make
sure everybody knows it. (There was an actual Count Dietrichstein in Beethoven’s
life, but not for another 20 years.) The great and revered Joseph Haydn arrives
in time for the last movement. He, too, wears a sour face, but at least lets
loose one quotable statement. “Everything is different from today,” says Herr
Haydn, and we know that history will prove him right.

One false start, but then the music sails on effortlessly. Imagine: an orchestra
in 1804, presented with the most innovative orchestral writing of its time –
violent rhythmic quirks, sudden key changes and dynamic shifts, and practically
at sight they start to sound like, well, like Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his
Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (who, indeed, they are). Eroica,
Nick Dear’s “award-winning period drama,” on a BBC Opus Arte DVD, serves
up a lavish chunk of musical and historic absurdity, beside which our old friend
Amadeus pales into a steadfast document of unimpeachable accuracy.

Britten as Written

Considering that Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw for Collier’s
Weekly, a popular fiction magazine in 1898 as it was until its demise some
60 years later, his ghost story has borne the weight of considerable serious analysis
and interpretation. There is reason to suggest that music – i.e., Benjamin Britten’s
tightly crafted chamber-opera setting of 1954 – puts forward the best of all explanations
of the wavering fault lines between fantasy and reality in James’ out-of-reach
landscape. The performances in the new BBC Opus Arte DVD of Britten’s opera (distributed
in the U.S. by Naxos), conducted by Richard Hickox – which is not a staging but
a re-enactment in a natural setting – allow the work to take its own shape. Katie
Mitchell’s opening up of the drama frees us from having to surmount the unnatural
barrier (in this instance) of equating a character’s inner thoughts with the spectacle
of singing mouths and artificial body movement on a cramped stage. Since much
of Britten’s opera consists of inner dialogue, the device is splendidly successful
here as it might not be in, say, La Traviata.

The setting is a not-all-that-grand country mansion in decaying, swampy woodlands,
with mists arising to mask the ghosts’ coming and going. The cast is as good as
you could want, with an insolence in the young Miles (Nicholas Kirby Johnson)
that you want to slap down on first meeting, and a plain-Jane helplessness in
Lisa Milne’s Governess that tells you she is up for defeat from the start. Mark
Padmore is the Quint and also sings the Prologue; something both ingratiating
and slimy in his tenorial thrusts chills you from the start. Their voices under
Hickox form a fine ensemble, without ever allowing this harrowing, vivid musical
drama to take on the artifice of mere opera. Like the studio-created version of
John Adams’ Death of Klinghoffer that I wrote about late last year, this
DVD points the direction of a new joining of music drama and video to the greater
enhancement of both.

Ring Around

The treasure of DVD operas currently available, and rapidly growing, is astonishing:
No similar luxury of choice has ever been available on any previous medium, not
even counting the “pirate” versions of, say, legendary Callas performances that
once drove collectors gaga – and play-actors too, as in Terence McNally’s Lisbon
Traviata. European and Australian opera houses televise most of their productions,
and these show up a few months later on DVDs, most often in decent productions
properly translated. Live-performance recording has its dangers, of course, but
one major advantage is the assurance of freedom from incompetent lip-synching.
Some of the earlier opera videos – the Karajan studio productions, for example
— are virtually unwatchable in this regard.

Wagner fares well – in quantity if not always quality. I wrote some time ago about
the Eurotrash Ring of the Nibelung from the Stuttgart Opera, with four
different directors imposing four ludicrous “modernized” settings on the timeless
mythology. Now, from Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, another Ring takes
shape, also on Opus Arte. Of the four dramas, Die Walküre and Siegfried
are already at hand. Bertrand de Billy is the conductor; he has been here, with
the Los Angeles Opera, in something-or-other. Falk Struckmann is the Wotan, Deborah
Polaski the Brünnhilde; both are excellent German-repertory singers at the top
of their powers. John Treleaven, the Siegfried, is not up to their level, however.
I found him brash and rather squally, and kept dwelling on Anna Russell’s immortal
description of Siegfried as “a veritable Li’l Abner.” Harry Kupfer is the stage
director; his production was originally mounted at the Deutsche Staatsoper Unter
den Linden in Berlin.

Kupfer’s work is the principal attraction here; these discs – and presumably the
entire Ring when the other parts appear – document one of the most creative
of the new generation of European stage directors. Like his Eurotrash-oriented
lesser colleagues, he tends to rethink and, thus, to recast classic operatic material.
The Ring seems to play out in a vast enclosure hemmed in with geometric
patterns generated by tubular lights that change color and thereby create dramatic
undertones and overtones. Most of Valhalla’s denizens, Wotan included, are thugs,
and that adds an important level of credibility to Wagner’s cynical dramatic design.
Time and place are kept purposefully fluid. If you’re not going to stage these
grand music dramas as Wagner’s own high Romanticism – as they are on the Metropolitan
Opera videos and in Stephen Wadsworth’s staging at the Seattle Opera – I think
these Harry Kupfer productions are, easily, the next best thing.

Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s controversial take on Wagner’s Parsifal got my back
up in San Francisco some years ago, and has since traveled to Chicago, London
and now to an Opus Arte DVD via a production at Baden-Baden conducted by Kent
Nagano. The problem here is not one of changed time or place – as it is, for example,
in the Syberberg film, which I find otherwise thrilling – but of a whole overlay
of ersatz symbolism with which Lehnhoff has burdened both the work and its audience.
The look of the production he has created, and the performance under Nagano –
in which Christopher Ventris, the Parsifal, has grown greatly since San Francisco
— are eloquent and moving; the Gurnemanz of Matti Salminen leaves me all aquiver
to see and hear him here, in the Robert Wilson staging, come November. But having
already succumbed to the spell of Wilson’s version in Houston some years ago,
I’ve come to resent the false turnings that Lehnhoff obliges me to follow in his
cockeyed interpretation, however splendid the musical performance under Nagano.

Obiter dictum: You need something cool after all this, and so, on ArtHaus,
there is Pierre le Grand. André Modeste Grétry is the composer, a lesser
(but not by much) contemporary of Haydn and Mozart. It’s a comic opera with spoken
dialogue having to do (but not much) with the founding of the city of St. Petersburg
by Peter the Great and his several girlfriends. The text, please note, is by one
Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, who went on to write the play Leonore, or Conjugal Love,
which served as the basis for Beethoven’s Fidelio.

Still here? Pierre le Grand is sung, in French and Russian, by the Helikon
Opera of St. Petersburg under Sergey Stadler. The voices are young and agreeable.
The production looks as if painted on bed sheets for the grand finale at a summer
camp, and somehow that is exactly right for the aura around this whole enterprise.
The music, as with everything in the small repertory of Grétry that anyone gets
to hear, is fabulously beautiful. Parsifal it isn’t.