So I've Heard

WORDS BECOME MUSIC

The sound of Frances-Marie Uitti’s cello resonates in the bloodstream. She would have it so; she has devoted considerable time and effort to enhancing the seductive throb of her instrument – developing a cello with six strings, and a way of playing with two bows. Next fall she starts a year’s residence at Berkeley, working on interactive electronic systems. I have no idea whether she uses this advanced technical stuff when she plays Bach or Dvorák; mostly she has hung out with the composers who match her visions: John Cage, Giacinto Scelsi, Iannis Xenakis. Born in Chicago, to Finnish parents, she now lives in Amsterdam, the world’s best place for visionaries.

On a new ECM disc, There Is Still Time, Uitti plays her own music while Paul Griffiths reads his poetry. Griffiths, Welsh-born, a sometime music critic and the author of some excellent writing on new music, has a voice that sounds like Uitti’s cello – don’t all Welshmen? – and he uses it the way she plays: intense, throbbing, now and then breaking off and darting in some unexpected direction. His poetry is darkly tinged with memory – “There it was, and it was, and it is gone.” Single words and phrases seem to dissolve into cello sound, and just as often the process is reversed. “Think of that day,” the poet intones. “Be there again,” he and the cello join to implore. “It was then … now it’s then again.” In Munich, where poet and cellist first performed the sequence live, Griffiths insisted on appearing barefoot.

There are 17 poems in There Is Still Time, some of few words, some crammed with words and breathless. When its 55 minutes are past, it is nearly impossible to resist playing the disc immediately again. I have written before about the Korean composer Unsuk Chin, mostly abut her great Violin Concerto, which we haven’t heard here yet, and about her Alice in Wonderland opera, which was supposed to show up at the L.A. Opera next season but is apparently lost down the rabbit hole. One major work of hers that has been performed here is the delightful Acrostic Wordplay, which George Benjamin conducted at a “Green Umbrella” concert seven years ago, and which heads a splendid collection of her short works on a recent Deutsche Grammophon disc. There is a hint of Alice in this 1993 work, too; the text is drawn from Lewis Carroll and other author, with narrative reduced to syllables or word fragments until only their significance remains. Text becomes music, music becomes text – or so the program notes imply, although I think that the aforementioned cello and reader achieve a more satisfactory metamorphosis. On its own, however, there is some delight in this bouncy, perky piece, and in the performance by the Ensemble InterContemporain, under Kazushi Ono, with Piia Komsi burbling out the syllables.

SPACE

On the same disc is the formidable Xi from 1998, with the EIC led by David Robertson; they played it here, at Royce Hall, that same year. Xi calls for large ensemble plus electronics, and multichannel processing, and sends the sound on a single broad arc around the performing space. The title in Korean, says the composer, means “the smallest unit, the origin of all things … thus, the idea of metamorphosis.” The buildup is awesome, from the sound of simple breathing to a wrenching, percussive apotheosis. Don’t make the mistake I did, hearing the music first on a car stereo in murderous Friday traffic on I-405 on my way to the Philip Glass concert I’ll tell you about a couple of paragraphs down. The sense from the music, that the whole car was coming apart, was not, let’s say, pleasant; it took further hearings to restore the realization that Xi is, indeed, some kind of sonic masterpiece.

So is the extraordinary Violin Concerto by Marc-André Dalbavie, which comes with two other works by him on a new disc from a label known as Naïve, which it is anything but. Pierre Boulez led one work by Dalbavie at a “Green Umbrella” concert in 1998; another is scheduled here next season. The three works on the new disc are vast soundscapes, with Debussy in their ancestry – above all the sense of limitless space in works like La Mer and the Nocturnes. The Violin Concerto, stupendously dispatched by Eiichi Chijiwa with Christoph Eschenbach conducting, comes with voluminous program notes on relationships of music to space and the “spatialization” of sound objects. But the exhilaration of the music speaks for itself.

GLOBAL GOOP

At Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Hall there was Philip Glass, his ensemble, an international gathering of participants, and Orion, 90 minutes of the usual accompaniments-plus-riffs that pass as his music these days. The gadget this time – there always is one – was the celebration in Athens last summer of the Olympics. Musics of many lands performed by talented proponents – Australia, China, Canada, the Gambia, Brazil, India, Greece – were stirred into the familiar background of our old friends, the Philip Glass Ensemble. The outdoor performance in Athens last June – a month when it never rains there – was accompanied by a howling downpour. Times were when people were more adept at heeding warnings from the gods.

What am I missing in the ongoing fame and acclaim surrounding the Philip Glass
phenomenon? I watch in wonderment as large audiences greet, with whoops and hollers
and standing ovations, works large and small – the Fifth Symphony, the new soundtracks
glued onto splendid old Cocteau movies, the insipid little Piano Etudes and now
this protracted venture in hands-across-the-seas patronization. I recoil at the
sheer tastelessness, not to mention the ugliness of sound, in combining the crystalline
elegance of Wu Man’s pipa (even if amplified to satisfy the space of Costa Mesa’s
barn of a hall) with the bovine keening of the alto sax from the Glass ensemble.
I reach for earplugs as the needlepoints in the sounds of an Indian sitar become
crammed into Western rhythmic patterns. What is put forth as assimilation, of
a joining of musical styles under the night sky lit by the stars of the Hunter
Orion, I hear as mindless exploitation. I do not enjoy mindlessness in a composer
I once admired. Come back to the beach, Einstein; we need you. Philip needs you.

Photo by Kenneth Ian PolakoffSITE NON-SPECIFICTrust the Long Beach Opera as time-and-place travelers. Not so long ago the company asked us to accept a transplant of Richard Strauss’ blood-drenched Elektra from sun-swept Grecian isles to the doom-haunted shores of Malibu. For its latest venture into anachronism, revealed two weeks ago in the Carpenter Center at Cal State Long Beach, the opera in question was Handel’s Semele — high-flying sex games among the crowd on Mount Olympus’ sacred slopes – and the curtain rose on an exact replica of the set for that further-down-to-earth epic of recent memory known as Dallas. Jupiter’s courtship of the nymph Semele went on at real-life Texas-style barbecues, and moved on a few scenes later to a motel complete with neon signage surrounded with a veritable fleet of cut-out cars of late-’70s vintage. And, to the surprise of nobody among us innumerable Long Beach Opera well-wishers, it all somehow worked. Isabel Milenski, daughter of the company’s founder, contributed another of her strong, imaginative productions – daring in outline, never beyond good sense. What mattered most, the preservation of Handelian musical values, came through beautifully projected in the strength of Andreas Mitisek’s musical leadership and the almost (if not entirely) crystalline clarity of the supporting Musica Angelica instrumental ensemble. Caroline Worra, the Semele, managed her couple of killer arias very nicely; Cynthia Jansen, the best-known name in the cast, was the bitch-goddess Juno and set the stage aflame in her well-known manner. Darcy Scanlin’s scenery for Semele used dozens of fake cars to good effect. The Threepenny Opera, Long Beach’s other June offering, had one genuine police car onstage, to no effect. Christopher Alden, directorial stalwart (along with his brother David) at Long Beach since the company’s founding, came up this time with a lame-brained staging of the Weill-Brecht masterpiece, empty in sight and sound. There were extensive cuts, and songs were assigned to the wrong characters (beginning with the “Mack the Knife” song sung by Macheath himself!) so as to undercut – dramatically and musically – much of the work’s glorious bite. The right instruments were in the pit, and Mitisek was successful in drawing from them the sounds and rhythms to honor Weill’s 1928 idea of down-and-dirty jazz. But not many people on the stage seemed capable of carrying that concept forward: only Constance Hauman as a blowzy Mrs. Peachum; Suzan Hanson, who delivered Polly’s two great songs; and Mark Bringelson as a deliciously corruptible Tiger Brown. But there was no swash and even less buckle in Hans Tester’s Macheath; the notion of enlisting a male singer (John Altieri) as Jenny (Lotte Lenya’s role in the original) was a touch of imposed cuteness whose benefits escaped me.
CARLO MARIA GIULINI (1914–2005)
It was a sight nobody can forget: the noble figure out of some grand seicento painting, approaching the Philharmonic’s podium proudly yet humbly. The music Giulini made during his time with us was the personification of that image: aristocratic and eloquent above all. I had the supreme good fortune of spending a week watching him rehearse the Beethoven Fifth in 1981: a warhorse, to be sure, but a work he hadn’t conducted in 16 years. His performance back then had displeased him; he had taken the time off to rethink his own attitude toward the score. Part of this process had been to re-study the hen-scratches that constituted Beethoven’s original manuscript, to puzzle over tiny details that might have eluded him 16 years before – and that might have eluded many other conductors as well. Sure enough, I went home and checked some of those details he showed me with other recordings on my shelves, including a couple of legendary Toscanini versions. Giulini had made some discoveries – not world-shaking, perhaps, but significant. This tells me much about Giulini not as a man of musicology, but as a man of conscience; that’s the memory I cherish. His Deutsche Grammophon recording of the Fifth, from those 1981 sessions, abides. His repertory was small, and it was limited to the music that lay within the realm of his own great spirit. At our first meeting – at a brief interview in Chicago, when he was still principal guest conductor of that city’s orchestra – he explained his difficulty with the music of Richard Strauss. “He comes toward me so strongly,” he explained, “that he leaves no room for me to come to him.” Later that day, Giulini conducted Chicago’s musical forces in Mozart’s Requiem at Orchestra Hall, and the first notes of that performance, the deep, sorrowing woodwinds, shared those sorrows with me in a way that I can still remember.
I talked to longtime Philharmonic cellist Dan Rothmuller the other day, collecting
Giulini reminiscences. “There’s a murderous passage in the Beethoven Ninth, one
of many,” Dan recalled. “It has the strings playing in sextuplets building up
to a crescendo. I remember once when Kurt Sanderling was guest-conducting, that
stern East German with a passion for detail. ‘Gentlemen,’ he shouted to the orchestra,
‘that passage is supposed to be the Apocalypse.’ Giulini came, and a couple of
years later we played the Ninth with him, and we came to the same passage. ‘Gentlemen,’
he told us, ‘this passage is the music of God and the lights of the Firmament.’”
Last year, on Giulini’s 90th birthday, Tim Mangan of the Orange County Register
got through to him by phone and published their conversation: sad, moving
and somehow deeply tinged with the Giulini we want to remember. Download
it here, and while you read it, listen to the Giulini recording that remains
my absolute favorite, the Dvorák Seventh Symphony with the London Philharmonic
that comes (or used to) on a two-disc EMI set with Nos. 8 and 9. Next week I’ll
list a few more essential Giulini recordings.
Obiter dictum: A quest for pure pleasure drew me back for a second
viewing of the Los Angeles Opera’s Der Rosenkavalier at its next-to-last
performance. Margaret Thompson replaced the ailing Alice Coote as Octavian; Suzanna
Guzmán replaced Thompson as Annina. Both were wonderful.

Photo by Tre VorleightonANTONIN, FRANZ AND RUDI
Two clarinets entwine around a soft arpeggio, and Antonin Dvorák’s F-major Symphony (No. 5 by modern listing, formerly No. 3) is under your skin before you feel its soft touch. No symphony makes its presence known more subtly, more endearingly, yet the work is seldom played. Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra performed it at Orange County’s Segerstrom Hall last week; before that, the last local performance I remember was by Christoph von Dohnányi and the Cleveland Orchestra at Ambassador Auditorium in 1991. Why the orchestra of this particularly gray, unlovable city should claim possession of this particularly radiant, lovable symphony escapes me; lucky Cleveland! The symphony is full of jollity, and also full of ghosts. The ghost of Schubert beguiles me the most. It lurks behind the marvelous good spirits of the opening movement, which is worthy to recall the giggling opening measures of the “Trout” Quintet. Its exuberance is touched with shadows, as it is in the String Quintet of Schubert’s last year. The symphony’s slow movement is the most Schubertian of all; the quiet, melancholy shading into exquisite dark lyricism uncannily evokes the extraordinary Andante of the symphony from Schubert’s deathbed, which has now been rescued from oblivion and published as the Tenth – and which Dvorák, of course, could not possibly have known. I do, I admit, hold a special place for the Dvorák Fifth; it is based on memories
of long standing. In student days in Vienna, my friend Rudi and I spent many an
afternoon working on this very symphony, in the four-hand piano-duet version that
I had bought, probably for 50 cents, in the used-music back room at Doblinger’s
music store. I’ll bet Franz Welser-Möst – who is, after all, from that sacred
land – shops there, too.
HOT AND COLD
Now Welser-Möst has inherited the Cleveland, with its tradition of performance excellence more burdensome than that of any other American orchestra. Here over the past week he has performed three varied programs in three venues, none of which – not even at Ojai – reflects the adventurous musical fare he has brought to Cleveland in his three years there. (Do we need whippersnappers from beyond the mountains to show how Ravel should go, so soon after our own Philharmonic season?) Not only for sentiment, I found the Dvorák the most successful manifestation of Welser-Möst’s musical profile during his time here. Looking back over my reports on his seasonal visits guest-conducting the Philharmonic, I find them hot and cold in almost equal measure, with words like “bratty” in frequent occurrence. In Cleveland, if David Mermelstein’s recent Los Angeles Times interview is to be believed (no easy task with that writer), he incurs critical wrath more often than not. Yet his contract has already been extended. (Zubin Mehta redux?) The orchestra, as heard last week at Segerstrom, at Disney and at the Ojai Festival, is not quite the legendary instrument invented by George Szell and maintained by Dohnányi; as much as one could tell from a tour date, its tone strikes me as high-class ordinary. Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, which followed the Dvorák at Segerstrom, was efficiently delivered but without the biting wit that is at its core. The elegance of Beethoven’s First Symphony turned flat and logy in the Disney concert from the conductor’s decision to employ an almost-full-string complement including six double basses; half as many would have been twice more, as Edo de Waart and our own Philharmonic had proved not many weeks before. Nothing in my book could have saved that concert’s major (in the sense of longest) work, Henri Dutilleux’s Second Symphony, known as “Le Double” for reasons having to do with the way the orchestral members were seated. I’ll leave it at that, since what I heard from the stage was just undifferentiated sound unrelated to who sat where. Dutilleux pushes on toward 90. He has his admirers; I am not one. His music descends from the imponderable French academics post-Franck, the d’Indy crowd, spiced with Stravinsky rhythms and Milhaud jazz – neither used with grace. “Le Double” has been around; it dates from 1959, and I cannot begin to tell you how delightful my life has been without having heard it until now. It did have the advantage of making Ravel’s Boléro, which followed it on the program, sound like a masterpiece. THEN OJAI
Under the live oaks and sycamores, Welser-Möst and the orchestra played Stravinsky (the “Dunbarton Oaks” Concerto) and Mozart (the “Linz” Symphony) with forces properly reduced on a stage of no discussable acoustic properties, with the sound amplified for folks on the lawn up back. Down front the sound was clear and truly lovely, recognizably “Cleveland” in quality. The novelty was an alto-sax concerto by Ingolf Dahl, a onetime Ojai hand, revered as the teacher of, among others, Michael Tilson Thomas. Noisy and brash, the work survives only as a curio; a knockout performance by Joseph Lulloff was of little avail. On another concert there were dueling concertmasters: the Cleveland’s William Preucil and the Philharmonic’s Martin Chalifour, in solo sonatas, some of Bartók’s beguiling Duets and an utterly worthless, utterly adorable Suite by Moritz Moszkowski. Better yet was Peter Serkin’s marvelously concocted solo recital – his first ever at Ojai – a brainy mix of ancient vocal and keyboard pieces neatly transcribed, mixed in with modern conceits, including a Messiaen bird number that exactly echoed the surrounding landscape. Strangest of all – and most forgettable – was an evening of bits and pieces that simply didn’t work. It started off with Kantrimiusik, a wildly divergent omnium-gatherum of pastoral dances, songs and sound effects somehow cobbled together by German-Argentine minimalist/collagist Mauricio Kagel. This led into more of same, another pastoral gatherum, this time of hey-nonny-nonny persuasion, of tunes invented or collected by the Australian-American charmer Percy Grainger – harmonized and orchestrated, actually, with more enterprise than is commonly ascribed to his name. Grant Gershon, pressed into service upon the illness of announced music director Oliver Knussen, marshaled his forces – singers, players, sound effects on- and offstage, including an impressive thunderstorm – with bravery that struck me as far beyond duty’s call. At the closing concert – and about time – there was a visitation of the kind of new music on which Ojai’s 59-year reputation rests: a big, rawboned, unashamedly romantic Violin Concerto by Knussen, written three years ago for Pinchas Zukerman and here handsomely dispatched by William Preucil, and Testament by the young (34) British composer Jonathan Cole, conducted by Brad Lubman in its world premiere. A haunting, soft meditation for small ensemble, Testament was underwritten in part by the Sue Knussen Commissioning Fund, to honor the much-missed educator and producer once at the Philharmonic. Next year the Ojai Festival turns 60. Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony are
listed among the celebrants, also Dawn Upshaw and Osvaldo Golijov. Celebrations
are in order.

Photos by Robert MillardFADED NOBILITY The critics were all over town last week – dance, theater, music – convening with their self-importance in full array, convoking their endless panel discussions (I led one), checking out what Los Angeles had to offer that Dayton did not, allowing themselves grudging respect for local amenities. I hung out with a few of the saner members of the music crowd, who spoke with some awe about Chinatown and even more about Amoeba. After all, New York or Chicago could house some 500 high-rise apartment dwellers, all waiting in line for the elevator, on the land of that awe-inspiring emporium. Our local music makers were at their best. Esa-Pekka and the Philharmonic, with some help from the Pacific Chorale, filled Disney Hall with the audible rainbow that is Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloë to end their season. Before had come John Adams’ Dharma at Big Sur — ear-catching in its billowing outbursts around Tracy Silverman’s electric violin but, for Adams, a curiously static piece. With the hall’s improved sound system, it didn’t antagonize the ear as it had during the inaugural concert in October 2003, but it remains a lesser work for Adams – which still places it on a high shelf. Across the street, the L.A. Opera ended splendidly, with two performances on levels unattained during an otherwise so-so season. No matter that both works – Verdi’s Falstaff and Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier — told basically the same tale in much the same way: dirty old man’s comeuppance at the hands of younger, cleverer connivers. Both resounded gloriously. They’re still on; for once, a top ticket price of $190 can be reckoned as “mere.” The Falstaff treads old ground. The sets date back to 1982, before there was an opera company, when the Philharmonic’s great Carlo Maria Giulini let himself be lured into opera. They were make-do then; look for the old laserdisc from when the production was new. But now there is Bryn Terfel’s Falstaff, which is sheer creative genius – not just the roisterer of the opera’s present day but the remnant of yesterday’s nobility. The comparison, actually, is worth attention: between the whole man – not the usual Falstaff stereotype – that Terfel creates in the final scenes of Verdi’s opera and the Baron Ochs embodied by Kurt Rydl in the Rosenkavalier as marvelously rethought by director Maximilian Schell. At the end, Ochs, too, in his most abject moment of discomfiture, must be reminded by the Marschallin that he, too, is a nobleman; in a quick, telling gesture he draws himself up accordingly. Many an Ochs I have seen has let this precious moment go by. Rydl did not. Kent Nagano conducts both operas: efficiently and nicely paced in the Falstaff; richly expressive and with the full range of authentic affection in the Rosenkavalier. The latter, indeed, is one of the company’s great triumphs, a visual rewrite of a work so encrusted in a much-observed tradition that you’d think the slightest new move might upset the balance. But no, from the opening in a bedroom furnished not in period fustian but in bare walls magically drenched in Alan Burrett’s saturated lighting, to the glorious overstatement of the look of the Baron himself, who seems costumed in neon, to the Marschallin’s final entrance, when the flush of her face seems to have drained into the unsexed blue of her gown, this is a story told in color and transformed – by the shaping skills of Max Schell’s direction and the design genius of Gottfried Helnwein – into a Rosenkavalier freshly renewed. The singing is every note as glorious as this enlightened production deserves: the clear yet melting sensibility of Adrianne Pieczonka’s Marschallin; the sturdy, unaffected Octavian of Alice Coote; the airborne shimmer of Elizabeth Futral’s Sophie – together in that final trio, which still floats in my ear like enchanted quicksilver. One further touch speaks for the evening’s high inventive level. Accompanying all three of the (admittedly long) act preludes are projected scenes from the 1926 silent film of Der Rosenkavalier, which was directed by Robert Wiene (of Caligari fame), and which now actually go very well with the noisy, trivial music. I’d love to see the film; both Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, insisted that it contain no action from the opera itself, and the cast did include the Marschallin’s husband (as the opera did not). We also get to see the young Octavian (played by the renowned Jacque Catelain) riding his horse to battle. Talk about filmic license! (Sudden flash: Could that misleading same-sex clinch on the Opera program book be a still from the film? I’ll bet!)
NAGANO’S WEEK
For his week’s third major accomplishment, Nagano delivered to a sold-out Royce Hall his Manzanar: An American Story — first developed with his Berkeley Symphony, performed at other California venues, and brought here on a wave of publicity, most of it deserved. To call the work an oratorio is to raise fears; the genre has absorbed much balderdash in recent years. Manzanar, however, rises far above expectations. Its music saves the day. Philip Kan Gotanda’s play details the Japanese presence in America, from the first arrivals to the forced internment in government camps after Pearl Harbor – with Manzanar, in Central California, singled out – to war’s end, the Vietnam era and the Reagan-engineered congressional “apology.” The text alternates between narration and drama, and was doled out this time among a distinguished cast that included Senator Daniel Inouye and noted actors Martin Sheen and Pat Suzuki. Nagano conducted the American Youth Symphony, which played this once far over its collective heads.
The music is a collaborative affair, with bursts of pop-music pastiche by David Benoit to establish the American timeline and a rather pretty pastorale by Jean-Pascal Beintus underscoring the routine of life at Manzanar. By far the most, and the best, of the music is the work of Naomi Sekiya, Japanese-born, USC-educated. I heard her music first at Ojai a few years ago, where an excellent short orchestral work of hers won a young composer’s prize; I’ve encountered a few student works at USC, also with pleasure. None of this prepared me for the power of her Manzanar score, however, which is big, raw, muscular and truly eloquent. Remember the name, Naomi Sekiya; you’re going to hear it again.

It happened on another 9/11 – 2000, to be exact. Tenor-superior Plácido Domingo, the L.A. Opera’s newly anointed artistic director, called a press conference, and the freeloaders were all there to sip the opera company’s coffee and sample Domingo’s pie-in-the-sky. There was plenty: a new production of Wagner’s Ring involving George Lucas, a new opera by John Williams, continual production swaps with the mighty Kirov of St. Petersburg. A quiet, bespectacled man sat up back. “I am delighted that my friend Alberto Vilar has pledged to me ongoing support for Los Angeles Opera,” said Domingo. “His extraordinary involvement will be manifested in supporting the Los Angeles Opera with an initial donation of $2 million in the 2001-02 season . . .” None of the above proclamations ever achieved fulfillment.

Alberto Vilar’s name still remains in two places on the L.A. Opera’s program, on the board of directors and among “Domingo’s Angels,” an elite list of “individuals who have made a leadership commitment to fulfilling the artistic initiatives of the Domingo seasons 2001–2005.” That does not, however, mesh with recent news about this flamboyant, if controversial, arts figure, co-founder (with Gary Tanaka) of the money-management firm Amerindo Investment Advisors, who with his partner spent the recent holiday weekend in a New York City jail facing criminal-fraud charges, unable to raise bail. There, as of June 6, Vilar remained.

In his day, Vilar rode his technology stocks to dazzling heights, and used the take to finance his operatic passion. At the Metropolitan his benevolence got him his name, in foot-high gold letters (recently removed), over the “Vilar Grand Tier” and a lifetime seat in Orchestra Row A-101 (a lousy location for a true opera lover for both sight and sound, if truth be told). London’s Royal Opera sported a Vilar Young Artists’ Program; the Vilar Center for the Arts stood proud in Avon, Colorado.

By the time Vilar had come to flash his bankroll at Domingo and the Los Angeles Opera, Vilar’s fortunes were already showing signs of tottering. One technology fund he controlled, The New York Times reported, fell 64.8 percent in 2000, and declined another 50.8 percent in 2001. The story circulated at the time that Vilar had decided to play footsie with Domingo in his new Los Angeles post only after the San Francisco Opera, which he had previously supported, backed away from his choice as artistic director and went with the modernist-leaning Pamela Rosenberg. For whatever reason, Vilar and Domingo became entwined. In the summer of 2000, Vilar invested heavily in Domingo’s prestigious “Operalia” talent competition, and then stayed on to lay his $2 million pledge on the company itself – plus $2 million to Domingo’s other company, the Washington Opera.

Almost immediately, things started not happening. The best anyone can glean from the public-relations strongholds at the Met, the Washington Opera and Los Angeles is that part of Vilar’s pledges – a total hovering around some $20 million over five years – has been restored by friends, including, of course, Domingo. (Rude thought: Might this be why the great man continues to pull down his singer’s fees, at an age when most tenors might sit back and retire the tonsils?) In 2002, New York Philharmonic conductor Lorin Maazel replaced, from his own pocket, a $700,000 pledge that Vilar had made for the orchestra’s conductors’ competition.

None of this, of course, adds up to the kind of boondoggle that results in a kind-faced, opera-loving gentleman – 64, born in New Jersey, raised in Cuba and Puerto Rico – being picked up by the feds at the Newark Airport on a holiday weekend. According to government sources, the charges involved an actual theft: $5 million from an old friend and Amerindo investor, and from three other women who accuse Vilar of helping himself to millions more of their money and refusing to give it back or to come up with promised interest.

One of the alleged victims is a woman who should be dear to all local opera lovers: Tara Colburn, the very classy, slender lady who sat down front center and set the whole Dorothy Chandler Pavilion aglow by her presence. Tara had endowed the opera company to pay for the supertitles that run above each performance; her husband, Richard, had paid for that whole music school across the street. Tara had deposited a large sum in Vilar’s investment firm, and when the market turned skittish, she tried to get it back. She died in May 2003. Vilar still hasn’t returned her money.

Amor, Amor . . .
The Liebersons have spent the week with us, and we are the better for it. Peter
Lieberson is the son of Goddard, who in his day was one of music’s authentic heroes.
Goddard Lieberson was the head of Columbia Records in the 1950s, the early days
of the LP, when records were a dominant means of preserving and transmitting the
essence of culture. He recorded all the music of Stravinsky, most of Schoenberg,
the playing of Glenn Gould, Bernstein’s Mahler, the first music anybody heard
by Steve Reich or Pierre Boulez. He didn’t care that Columbia lost its shirt recording
esoteric repertory, because it also sold millions of copies of André Kostelanetz
and South Pacific and balanced the books that way. Young Peter grew up
in a home where Stravinsky came to dinner, and Miles Davis. His mother was the
dancer and actress Vera Zorina; you saw her in great old movies (The Goldwyn
Follies, for one) and heard her as the speaker in Stravinsky’s recording of
his Perséphone. Inevitably, Peter grew up with a head full of music.

His own influences included Milton Babbitt and Donald Martino and Tibetan Buddhism. A few years ago, Peter Serkin was here to perform a Lieberson piano concerto, which I found full of wheels going around but not very friendly. At one of last week’s concerts at Disney Hall there was another dry-point early work, Lieberson’s Drala from 1986. Both had been written before Lorraine Hunt entered Lieberson’s life, and became his wife and his voice. Most of his music that was played here these past two weeks – the songs to texts by Rilke and Neruda, a Piano Quintet and a Horn Concerto – postdate that meeting. It is all a different kind of music, by a composer wondrously transformed by the presence of, let’s say, the greatest dramatic singer of our time. Before Lorraine Hunt Lieberson came onstage to join Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic in her husband’s Neruda Songs last week, I might have wondered why management was devoting that much program time to not that eminent a composer. Half an hour later, I wanted it all to go back and start again.

The poems are love songs by Pablo Neruda to his third wife, Matilde – not ardent mooncalf stuff but aching, middle-aged, wise love full of dark coloration. Lieberson, wisely I think, left them in the original Spanish, allowing Lorraine to draw upon gorgeous, sensuous vocal purples and dark wines for such words as luna and azul. His orchestra is small and beautifully used, always mirroring the rapture of the words. A recording has been promised; count the days. At a “Green Umbrella” concert a few days later there were more songs for Lorraine, a set of Rilke settings with piano, more complex in musical line and with the rasp of German words rather than the mellow Spanish. But the instrumental works – the Piano Quintet, with its charming echoes of country fiddling, and the jolly bluster of the Horn Concerto, with visiting virtuoso William Purvis to blow it sky-high – were further evidence of the warming and humanizing that seems to have taken hold in Lieberson’s music these past few years, and it isn’t hard to figure out why. Love conquers all.

Double Doom
A proper performance of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise can move an audience to deep sadness with nothing more than a singer and a pianist delivering the cycle of 24 songs alone on the stage. Alone in a cold attic room, a reader can make his or her way through Johann von Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther with nothing more than the book in hand, and be driven at the end to suicide – as, apparently, hundreds of impressionable adolescents were in the ——–
AUTHOR’s day. Combining the two as a single entertainment, a venture in redundancy to say the least, might produce, you’d think, a roomful of lemmings.

You would, however, be reckoning without the enterprise of the Long Beach Opera, whose new managerial force, Andreas Mitisek, is apparently out to prove himself ready to maintain high aloft the brave banners of iconoclasm erected by the company’s founding spirits. Against every better judgment I could possibly summon under the circumstances, Mitisek has, indeed, worked out a conflation of these two trajectories down the dark road of heartbreak and self-destruction, and played them off against each other without violating the integrity of either. This all happened not in the company’s usual performing venue at Cal State Long Beach, but in an experimental space, not much larger than this page, at the Edison Theater in downtown Long Beach, where, according to plan, such small-scale LBO productions will occur from time to time.

Mitisek directed, gave the pre-performance talk, hung out with the crowd, did
everything but pour coffee; it’s clear that he wants this to be his company,
and he’s entitled. He has been fortunate in his principal performer this time,
a young baritone named Erik Nelson Werner, who sang the 24 songs of Schubert’s
cycle (23 of the 24, actually, since one song was an offstage recording of “Frühlingstraum”
for reasons that escape me) quite creditably and interspersed them with forceful
spoken excerpts, in English, from Werther’s self-pitying monologues. That much,
at least, worked quite well. For staging there was a cluttered attic room, a bed
and scattered trash – almost exactly the same set, if anyone cares to remember,
as the 1986 Long Beach Tales of Hoffmann. Unfeeling, rejecting
Lotte was done in dumb show by a dancer, Jennifer Hart Jackson. At the very end,
when the dead Werther lay in her lap, she extended one hand in a caress – a small
directorial touch that I found extremely moving. Michelle Schumann was the pianist,
behind a scrim. Midway, she added part of the slow movement of Schubert’s last
piano sonata, which, in this context, became the saddest music in the world –
and also, at that moment at least, the most beautiful.

A HOLLOW RING
The news had begun to circulate over the weekend, so that by Monday night the
crowd at the County Museum for the EAR Unit season’s final concert was considerably
larger than usual. The news involved decisions by LACMA’s directors to end, or
at least curtail, its activities as a presenter of concerts in its 600-seat Bing
Theater, activities that considerably predate the building itself and that include
the Monday Evening Concerts that have been the oldest continuous series of its
kind anywhere in the country. “Its kind” has meant programs of high adventure:
contemporary music, early music, music from the familiar repertory from all periods,
in performances of unusually high caliber. There have also been programs on other
nights: concerts of more familiar repertory supported by the Rosalinde Gilbert
Estate, Ensemble Residencies by two of the area’s most enterprising chamber groups
— the EAR Unit and XTET – and free jazz concerts on the museum’s plaza.

Now, suddenly, word is out that the ax is poised and about to fall. Before the EAR Unit concert, as it happened, there was a dinner at the museum for visiting arts journalists at which the program’s two composers, Paul Dresher and Mort Subotnick, legitimized the event by talking about their music. There were also boilerplate speeches by the museum’s curators and other reps, rattling on about LACMA’s commitment to the arts, but these rang hollow given the occasion. There is further word of negotiations still going on, but the situation at this writing is that the Monday Evening Concerts – the most creative series, the direct inheritor of an enterprise that began (as “Evenings on the Roof”) on a Silver Lake rooftop in 1939 and has been the heartbeat of the Los Angeles creative impulse since then – will be vouchsafed one more year of life, under the leadership of Dorrance Stalvey, who has run the series since 1971, and then close down forever. The free jazz will continue. The residency programs and the Rosalinde Gilbert series will be discontinued.

People around town are writing letters, as well they should. There were things wrong with the museum concerts, most of all the drab, uncomfortable auditorium, which was much too large. Stalvey, 75 and not well, has never had the support from the museum that would have enabled him to publicize his concerts properly; some amazing events have gone on before audiences of 100 or fewer. The eventual end of programming at the museum does not pull the plug on small-music concerts in the area, of course. There’s Santa Monica’s Jacaranda (see below), which I’ve come to love; there’s more and more good music at the Zipper Concert Hall downtown, including the valuable “Piano Spheres” series, and at Disney Hall’s REDCAT. There are the hot-ticket “Historic Sites” concerts, if you can get near them. I am concerned, however, at the decline of serious music events at UCLA, whose current program manager, David Sefton, seems to have his head buried in esoteric foreign theater while one of the city’s best halls, Royce, goes sadly underused.

But music at LACMA has always been more than any of this, because Stalvey – and Stalvey alone – has run the series as a flowing pipeline to the world of current creativity, blended into the strong impulses of music’s great past. Cases in point: the Penderecki Quartet concerts, which I exulted over last week, or the New York New Music Ensemble, or the Parisii, or the amazing bassist Scodanibbio – all of whom entered Los Angeles’ awareness thanks to Stalvey’s booking. The EAR Unit, rounding out 18 years’ residence at LACMA, was and remains a unique organization, above all for a certain built-in ecstasy in its playing that sends everything skyward.

Most of the EAR members and Subotnick grew up at CalArts, after all; there was something in Mort’s new big piece they played the other night, the 2003 Release for electronic sounds and instruments, that seemed to sum up the broad gestures of their lifetimes: something of his pioneering earlier work, the electronic/symphonic Silver Apples of the Moon or the mixed-media Key to Songs, historic but still very fresh and exuberant. So, too, for Paul Dresher’s The Tyrant — unusually, for him, a non-electronic piece, a monodrama for tenor and instruments drawn from an Italo Calvino text on tyranny that also became Luciano Berio’s Un Re in Ascolto: tense, bitter drama handsomely set forth by the apparently indestructible Jonathan Mack.

A HAPPIER ENDING
Splendidly planned and produced, the Jacaranda concerts at Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church give me the impression of a series of aristocratic musical evenings fashioned by exceptionally intelligent people for their own pleasure first of all, and for anyone of like mind who happens by. The exceptionally intelligent people are the partners Patrick Scott and Mark Hilt, and the second year of Jacaranda, which concluded last weekend with a Benjamin Britten program, has been a glowing tribute to the high inventive level that these concerts have attained from the start. The like-minded, furthermore, have been happening by in droves. The church itself is handsome, small and comfortable; its new concertgoing friends pray that the current round of repairs and additions will keep it so. Patrick does the welcoming, and writes the uncommonly informative program notes. Mark is the organist and choir director, and the one small drawback at this Britten evening was that the Chancel Choir, numbering 14, is not quite ready for prime time.

Everything else was. The Denali Quartet, which has been Jacaranda’s resident string group from the start and grows in strength and expressive depth, mastered the Britten Third Quartet, a work of remarkable richness and subtlety of tone, centered on a slow movement that is a long, haunting violin solo with other instruments massed as a soft shimmer underneath. Oboist Keve Wilson and violist Alma Lisa Fernandez unearthed Britten solo works seldom heard, and the chorus did muster a fair degree of strength at the end to deal with the mix of the childlike and the visionary in the remarkable cantata Rejoice in the Lamb.

Jacaranda’s third season begins in October with an American program. The whole
season isn’t quite set, but what’s been confirmed includes a lot of my favorite
music and, perhaps, yours as well. They may run out of music at LACMA, but not
in Santa Monica.

All Fours
Two nights of high musical adventure at the start of the month were reason enough
for gratitude: to the dauntless, imaginative programming and performance skills
of the Penderecki String Quartet, and to the leadership of the County Museum,
which has brought the group here repeatedly for some of the best chamber-music
events I have encountered anywhere in the world in recent years. The Penderecki
— Toronto-based despite its name – has sailed into challenging new music with
ardor and creative impulse worthy of its namesake in his own early, astonishing
years (and therefore, alas, far beyond the damping of those flames in his recent
years). On this visit, the ensemble also took on similar challenges in music from
earlier times: extraordinary works by Haydn and Beethoven in which the urge to
move beyond familiar boundaries throbbed no less powerfully. Aside from one trashy
bit easily forgotten, in fact, both programs were strictly edge-of-seat stuff.

“Surely the saddest thing ever said in notes,” wrote Richard Wagner of the opening music of Beethoven’s C-sharp minor Quartet (Opus 131), thus setting aside his own third-act Prelude to Tristan und Isolde. Here is Beethoven a year from death, illness-racked in a world swept by his music’s growing fame . . . “tapped and drained and physicked and hayseed-bathed and narcotized,” writes Joseph Kerman, “[ordering] in the string quartet what he was so pitifully unable to order in any other aspect of his existence.” The exercise of compositional power in this stupendous work grabs you in the dismal emptiness of that opening fugue with its dying falls into bleak dissonances. It releases you, also somewhat tapped and narcotized, 40 minutes later.

The dedicated performances, of which the Penderecki Quartet’s was one, jar you mightily with every one of the music changes, because those changes are like nothing that has ever happened in music before that time. C sharp to D, the squeeze over just a half-step; D grinding back to C sharp: These shifts, for 1826, represent music’s ultimate bad manners. Beethoven delivers these blows not spread throughout a classical format with four movements neatly spaced, but in a nonstop 40-minute expanse with no moment to breathe and every change delivered as a rude jolt. As well as I think I know the sequence of astonishing events in this one-of-a-kind work, I was delightedly swept away by the Penderecki performance, the explosive power of its transitions, the sublime if brief relaxations in the slow variations, the bone-crushing exuberance of its final measures.

Secret Messages
Exactly a century separates Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite of 1926 from the tortures that produced Beethoven’s Opus 131. Recent researches in the form of newly discovered letters, fragments and manuscripts reveal that this work, too, is a document of torture, a fabric of interwoven references and messages relating to Berg’s secret affair(s), with the person or persons in question subtly identified by initials, which then become embedded in the musical themes. The score thus becomes a complicated web of clues leading toward the elaborate plotting of a love affair that, in all probability, was never fulfilled and was never even meant to be. (The final, climactic quotation from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, that epic of coitus interruptus, all but screams this out loud.)

What should be a lot more important is the beauty of the music; this, again, was
the element made most luminous by the Penderecki, intense and stirring. I know
of two ways to approach this work. One takes most seriously Berg’s capitulation,
for the first time in a large score, to the 12-tone principles of his teacher
Schoenberg, and delivers the work as proud if somewhat uptight product of Vienna
II. The other reacts more seriously to the music’s many built-in rubrics (amoroso,
estatico, giovale) and respects the urging of the title itself. I found
this a deeply moving performance, possibly the most so of my experience. It seemed
in a strange way to bridge the century between these two troubled masterworks:
the glistening, insinuating, delirious scherzi of both; the lyric urgency of their
slow movements, which takes on an almost human throb.

Other Voices
Witold Lutoslawski’s one String Quartet began the first program; one of Joseph Haydn’s 83 works in that medium – the C-major, Opus 54 No. 2 – began the second: works 177 years apart, once again original unto themselves. The Haydn, in fact, is quite an amazing work. Its departures from the hypothetical Rule Book of Classical Practice begin in the slow movement, wherein the first violin soars high above the quiet melodic line in a rhapsodic, Gypsy-like improvisation. They continue with the crushing dissonances in the Trio of the Minuet, not at all your basic 18th-century dancerie. They conclude when the finale, not the usual jovial sendoff, turns into a quiet, slow benediction. Expect the unexpected, Haydn tells us, and in no uncertain terms.

Lutoslawski, a frequent visitor here until his death in 1994, fashioned his String Quartet, as many of his works, on a flexible blending of chance principles and strict usage: elements not necessarily audible from out front but clear enough to musicians brave enough to work through his ideas onstage. What comes over from, say, the combination of players working simultaneously in different rhythmic variants and with changing textures, is a music of terrific emotional impact, often shading with brutal suddenness toward huge climaxes, then back to a shattering, sudden silence. It is also, as these words may suggest, not the world’s easiest music to describe. Its power, however, is beyond argument, as is its ability to bring out the best in brave performance ensembles.

Oh yes, I mentioned “trash” back there, didn’t I? That was supplied by Omar Daniel’s
Annunciation, wherein the 45-year-old Canadian composer seeks to distill,
via string quartet, color slides and some vague electronic grumbling, the moment
of the Angel Gabriel breaking the news to Mary as captured by seven Renaissance
masters. Since that particular biblical moment has inspired some of the world’s
most sublime art, as the slide show all too clearly proved, you’d think that perhaps
an upstart composer like Mr. Daniel might want to earn his spurs with a musical
setting of perhaps an R. Crumb cartoon or a Carnation Baby calendar. You’d be
wrong.

Photo by Betty FriedmanBY GEORGE
The Pacific Symphony’s American Composers Festival is a class act if ever one
was. The fifth running, which ended last weekend, may have been a lumpier mix
than some, but it brought some interesting music to venues in Irvine and Costa
Mesa, and some of its composers came along as well. Interspersed among the four
main concerts there were talks and exhibitions. The Pacific Symphony management
produced a splendid DVD full of archival material and interviews; everybody got
a free copy. That’s what you call enlightenment.
Joseph Horowitz plans these festivals: not just a lot of good music, but concerts interestingly built around Horowitz’s own area of concern, the history of interaction between serious music making and the consciousness of American audiences. The first of this year’s concerts dealt particularly with American composers exploring the world. It began at some distance, with Colin McPhee journeying to Bali in the 1930s and trying, not entirely successfully, to transfer the sounds of a gamelan to Western instruments. (McPhee died in 1964, in an alcoholic haze on the UCLA faculty, having failed to persuade that famously shortsighted institution to recognize ethnomusicology as a legitimate study.) From recent times a McPhee imitator, Canada’s José Evangelista came up with more pseudo-Balinese stuff, reminiscent of Muzak in a tiki-tiki cocktail lounge. Something of Lou Harrison’s far more observant gamelan-inspired music would have been appropriate here, but he is being held on tap for next year’s festival. Instead, in a giant leap forward, we soared airborne on the clarinet of Richard Stoltzman, to the maximal minimalism of Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint and the Yankee aphorisms of John Adams’ Gnarly Buttons. Not Yankee but Appalachian, George Crumb – “the Uncle of Us All,” as I called him the last time he was in town – was on hand for the second concert. A Sunday-evening program in modest surroundings consisted entirely of his music, with Uncle George himself, in his easygoing twang and deep musical wisdom, as host. He is such good company that it’s easy to forget the power of his music from long ago, the paralyzing electricity of Black Angels or the breath-stopping subtleties of the Ancient Voices, not to mention the disarming portrait of the Crumb family dogs, scored for junk instruments, with which he beguiled us last time. This time the music was mostly ethereal, hovering on the edge of silence: the Voice of the Whales and Lux Aeterna, with the players in half-masks to enhance the sense of non-worldliness. The music hangs in the air and seems to penetrate our every pore, not merely our ears. Crumb enhances the sense of distance with instruments of many worlds: a sitar from there combined with flute and percussion from here. VANITY FAIR Joe Horowitz, soft-spoken, rabbinical in mien, a veteran of the wars as music
critic and concert manager, has found an interesting niche in his overview of
the history of musical consumership, nicely detailed in previous books on the
inane media exploitation of Toscanini in the conductor’s last, almost-senile years,
and on the mass hysteria that sent audiences gaga by the thousands – mostly women
— in the early days of Wagner adoration. His new book, Classical Music
in America (Norton), casts a broader net: not so much a story
of star performers or composers as about promoters and audiences across the land,
and about high culture and low manipulators in the broad panorama of the growth
of America’s musical taste. You wonder at the curious fellowship of Beethoven
and Barnum, and at their survival. It’s all gossip of the highest order.
I wonder, therefore, what kind of chapter the Pacific Symphony might merit in some future edition of Horowitz’s book, if he ever gets around to allotting the West Coast the space it merits (which he hasn’t, yet). Here is an orchestra like several in the area – Long Beach, Pasadena, Ventura, Hollywood Bowl – drawing its personnel from the pool of freelance players who work in the studio by day and salve their consciences by tossing off a symphony or two at night. The PSO offers a 10-program classical subscription season, plus pops and kiddies’ concerts, about a third of what a full-time orchestra (the Philharmonic, say) plays. Its personnel remains fairly constant from concert to concert, even from year to year, but you can’t talk about a distinctive orchestral “personality” when players must shift style so drastically from one gig to the next. The orchestra was founded in 1978; Carl St. Clair is only the second conductor. You have to dig deep to discover the name of the first; people don’t talk about Keith Clark except to hold their noses when they mention particular performances. St. Clair, whose talents I would list as middle-echelon all-purpose, is locally adored. He is young-looking, sort of cute with major hair, talks freely of his friendship with Lenny and other flamboyant notables, and builds his prestige with a few guest shots on European podiums. The orchestra has gold-plated an aura by commissioning a few new works by American composers in that safe, oracular mode that lets audiences believe that they’re hearing new music but enables them to emerge without a scratch: an American Requiem here, a Vietnam Oratorio there. You know the stuff; it’s a whole repertory designed to allow boonie orchestras on limited rehearsal schedules to gratify local donors with player- and listener-friendly affectations of High Artistic Significance. And now those local donors will stand all the taller, as the Pacific Symphony readies its travel togs for its first-ever European tour, in the spring of 2006, with some of this grand American repertory in its luggage. Think of it, this ad hoc aggregation of studio freelancers and part-timers, touring the concert halls of Europe just like the Boston Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. There’s pride for you. Or “vanity,” did I hear someone whisper? Back home in Costa Mesa, a new venue is being readied for the Pacific Symphony upon its return. The new Segerstrom Hall, with its 2,000 seats, is bound to be an improvement on the older, 3,000-seat Segerstrom Hall across the way – although the most glamorous of the opening-week celebrations, the visiting Russians with their ballets and operas, take place in the old hall. Meanwhile, as in some of the best operas you can name, the dark clouds gather. Opera Pacific, not so long ago a major adornment at the old hall, now totters: one performance canceled, one new production replaced with a warehouse item, the once-splendid Porgy and Bess reduced to an unstaged version. Nobody ever said it would be easy.

BOY-OH-BOY

We have yet to experience the pleasure of observing Susan Graham in action on the operatic stage, but her solo recital at the Chandler Pavilion, from first note to last, was an event of high and delightful theater. “First note” consisted of her acting out simply, with her fingers slinking insinuatingly around the edge of Malcolm Martineau’s piano, tracing the insidious double meanings of delightful Apollinaire nonsense texts amplified to triple and quadruple meanings in a set of endearing Poulenc songs. “Last note” was the desperate high hilarity of her final encore, “Sexy Lady,” an autobiographical lament created for her by Ben Moore, detailing the sad fate of a 6-foot-2 mezzo-soprano of irresistible stature and honeyed voice, condemned by these physical magnificences to a lifetime of roles as trousered, oversexed, male warriors. (Sad, but boy-oh-boy fabulous . . . or did you miss her Octavian in the Met broadcast of Der Rosenkavalier a couple of weeks before?)

She is a treasure, this Graham, a matter happily known to opera audiences everywhere but here. The breadth of her program was astonishing in itself: not just the usual recital routine with the solid stuff at first and then the Twinkies. This time an adoring near-capacity house was better rewarded, with an elegantly planned range of entertainments to engage both the intelligence and the delight of its hearers, starting with the insidious wit of Poulenc and Ravel balanced against the radiant lyricism of Berlioz from a century earlier. Following intermission there was a momentary slump via some vapid note-spinning by the opportunistic yet woefully talentless Jake Heggie, but that emptiness was soon redeemed with a cheering gathering of Ives, unfamiliar and extraordinarily beautiful. At the end, where the lightweight novelty numbers go on most recital programs, there came instead a set of Mahler, haunting and powerful. A singer who trusts her audience with this kind of programming deserves a return visit. Is it ungallant to suggest that the title role in Offenbach’s Grand Duchess of Gerolstein, on the books for the Los Angeles Opera’s next season, has been allotted to only the second-best choice?

THE RIGHT “TOUCH”

Alone of the hell-raising artists who made up the so-called New York School in the 1950s – among them the composers John Cage and Morton Feldman and the painter Philip Guston – Christian Wolff survives; he has always been the least-known. Until his recent retirement he taught classics at Dartmouth. His 2002 piano piece called Touch, written for the Stanford pianist and teacher Thomas Schultz, was the major work on Schultz’s Piano Spheres recital at Zipper Hall last week, the season’s final concert in this nicely planned series.

Like much of the work of his New York Schoolmates, Wolff’s 20-minute piece is a neat mix of options and strictures. Dynamics are left to the performer’s choice, and there are times when the manuscript even leaves unspecified whether a passage belongs in treble or bass clef. But, as Schultz pointed out in well-written program notes, and did again in congenial talk before his performance, such matters are of less importance than matters of texture, drive and actual sound. In these regards I found Touch an exceptionally attractive new work for piano. I would also urge on the enlightened Piano Spheres management, whose series has become one of this city’s major assets (although you wouldn’t know this from the paltry size of last week’s crowd), to consider ways of enhancing the value of premieres such as this by scheduling second, third and fourth hearings in the not-too-distant future. Premieres are all very well; however, I left Thomas Schultz’s concert with a lot of other good music in my head, but an immediate desire to hear that one piece again.

The “other good music” included one of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s killer Klavierstücke and a big, dramatic work by Frederic Rzewski, one of his marvelous “Four Pieces” from 1977. There was also considerable time wasted, alas, with a pair of wispy, cruelly overextended pieces by the Bay Area Korean composer Hyo-Shin Na, where a repeat of the Christian Wolff would have been a more imaginative choice. But I dream.

SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS . . .

On a summer evening some 30 years ago, a friend and I arrived at Troisgros, the legendary three-star multifork restaurant in the south of France, aglow with anticipation for a dinner we had reserved many months before. Upon being seated, we noted with horror the adjoining table, where sat a company of well-fed executive types heavily wreathed in cigar smoke. Mustering my rudimentary French, I cast my culinary hopes upon their mercies – to no avail. Fortunately, Monsieur Troisgros allowed us to postpone dinner until the air had cleared. His explanation came with a resigned shrug: “Ce sont des Belges.”

Memories of that dinner – not the masterworks from the Troisgros kitchen but the atrocities that preceded – returned loud and clear at Disney Hall last weekend as the Philharmonic, organ and all, took on Joseph Jongen’s Symphonie Concertante, music as painful to the senses as anything I can remember being imposed upon me in my long years on the local scene: music, indeed, of a terribleness so wretched as to stir up memories of those clouds of cigar smoke in Roanne that night of contrasting fragrances so long ago. Monsieur Jongen, perhaps I neglected to inform you, was also a Belgian.

The music dates from 1926, composed originally for the monster pipe organ at the Wanamaker department store in Philadelphia (where I once participated in a St. Matthew Passion sing-along, standing next to the necktie counter). Imagine the loudest, most chromatically convoluted, defiantly non-ending piece of César Franck’s organ music, and paste onto that an orchestral counterpart equally loud and long, but also grindingly out of tune with the organ (as orchestras-versus-organs inevitably are). Thirty-five minutes pass. The ears ache, the teeth rattle, you wish for a lungful of Belgian cigar smoke as blessed relief. Before that, on this disastrously downhill program, had come the wonderfully smart, insinuating Piano Concerto of Maurice Ravel; before that, the clear-headed, ballsy First Symphony of Beethoven.

Edo de Waart conducted; apparently he likes the thing, and has even recorded it.
Jean-Yves Thibaudet was soloist in the Ravel, mucho zippy. Cherry Rhodes, dressed
in Dracula colors, was seated that day at the organ. At the end, where even a
loud C-major chord usually draws a standing ovation from the Disney crowd, there
was next to none. There is hope for us yet.