So I've Heard

Blini

Three orchestras held the Disney stage on successive evenings last week, diverse in program offerings and in musical language. Two of the groups were of symphony-orchestra size (100 or so); the other numbered 10. In Disney’s acoustic splendor, all three produced, when called for, prodigious varieties of wondrous sound. I didn’t hear a deathless masterpiece at any of the concerts, but I wasn’t lured into an early departure at any of them either – not even when, at the first event, I stumbled over the Sibelius Violin Concerto lurking in some dark corner of the program by Valery Gergiev and the visiting Kirov Orchestra (fresh in from the Mariinsky Theater of St. Petersburg).

That singularly empty, aimless, drab spinoff from the Sibelius treadmill – phenomenally played this time by the Greek whizbang Leonidas Kavakos as if in a single stroke of the bow – didn’t even turn out to be the worst piece on that program (as it usually is). The place of dubious honor belonged that night to the Second Symphony of Sergei Prokofiev, the least known of his seven, music so little played that I couldn’t find a fellow critic’s comment to crib, music thoroughly terrible and therefore, I suppose, worth hearing this once. The score, “a symphony of iron and steel,” the composer once said, dates from 1924. Compared to Prokofiev’s other great dissonant works of the time – the Scythian Suite, for example, or the opera The Fiery Angel — its half-hour’s music seems to meander nowhere and everywhere, with a final movement that consists of an opening theme and about six logical endings, all of which the composer bypassed. Like everything else on Gergiev’s program, it was accorded the full 21-gun treatment.

With or without his orchestra, Gergiev has acceded to living-legend stature; while among us last week, he also planted a few more flags in press conferences down in Orange County, where he will help celebrate the new concert hall by leading operas in the old concert hall. In the Kirov Orchestra he has created an icon, a self-image in both sight and sound. Hearing the unit hurl itself upon the first measures of Borodin’s Second Symphony – with the double basses massed up in the corner of the stage, howling like wolves on the moonlit steppes – you might wonder how this onslaught on Borodin’s careful structures might relate to the intentions of the gentle pharmacist-turned-composer. Even with its native music so blatantly overplayed, you recognize that this is some kind of unique orchestra, with whip-cracking conductor to match, and that they mean business.

Ravioli

The second work on the next night’s program, Samuel Scheidt’s Battaglia á 5 — battle music for five string players and keyboard, published around 1621, performed by the Italian visitors who call themselves Il Giardino Armonico (the Garden of Harmonies) – seemed like a distant but accurate echo of the Russian hurly-burly of the night before. Styles have changed rapidly in the performance of Baroque string music, as I noted a few weeks ago when some gooey, romanticized version of Vivaldi’s Seasons hit the market. Not long ago, the “authentic” Baroque style consisted of the very elegant, if somewhat bloodless, foursquare playing of I Musici and the Virtuosi di Roma, who purvey their Vivaldi very straight and nicely patterned. Now come these harmonious gardeners – only half of the full group that you can hear on their new Naïve disc titled At Home With the Devil, but still plenty loud and full of the Big Baroque Bounce. By contrast with their tractor-driven horticultural approach, those earlier “authentic” ensembles suddenly sound just a bit sleepy.

The aforementioned Scheidt piece called for great outbursts of sound: trills and cascades of tone, the instruments re-tuned to create dissonances and strange sound effects. The Giardino’s leader, Giovanni Antonini, performed a Vivaldi flute concerto with a remarkable slow movement, full of chromatic twists and turns. Another flute concerto, by one Nicola Fiorenza, ended the program with a full-scale, four-handkerchief jerking of tears, music as firmly anchored in the minor modes as any Verdian death scene in the centuries to come. They don’t write ’em like that anymore, I am happy to report.

Palatschinken

By the end of his two-week residency on the Philharmonic podium, Iván Fischer had infused the orchestra’s language with the soft, elegant melancholy of Central Europe – specifically, this second week, the robust, carb-laden harmonies of Bohemia’s romantic masters Bedrich Smetana and his younger countryman Antonin Dvorák. Mistreated as their music may be through the years at Bowl and Pops concerts, the proper shaping hand – as Fischer wields with exceptional grace and wisdom – draws from this music a message coaxing and irresistible. In music as simple as the B-major Notturno for Strings, which Dvorák originally planned as a movement in his G-major Quintet and later expanded, any modest turn of phrase, when phrased as Fischer’s strings did the other night, becomes a memory that clings.

Dvorák’s Violin Concerto was the evening’s most substantial work, nicely played by Martin Chalifour but with no more drive than it deserves. Dvorák’s legacy glows with one supremely great concerto, but this isn’t it. What was lovelier to hear from his pen this night, and far less familiar, was the set of the early Moravian Duets for soprano and mezzo (Carolyn Betty and Kelley O’Connor), with a gentle orchestration contrived by Fischer himself: bittersweet, piercing harmonies that defined the wonderful, distinctive language that Dvorák would go on to shape into the great works of his mature years. Ending the program were three of the six audible travel posters that make up Smetana’s My Country: the often-sailed Moldau and two others less known but no less enchanting. If there had been a Czech Republic travel agent outside Disney Hall that night, I would have been first in line for tickets.

Rhapsodic Hungarians

Seldom had the Brahms First Symphony sounded more turgid, more irrelevant, than at the end of last week’s Philharmonic concert. Preceding that hapless work, visiting conductor Iván Fischer – master programmer, he – had set the air aglow at Disney Hall with the music of Brahms’ own birthright: the rhythms and harmonies of Hungary’s gypsies, some of it straight, some of it refined and sugarcoated for the serious concert hall. Latter-day gypsies had come over from some of Budapest’s finest bands: a fiddler in the old style, his violinist son, and a virtuoso on the cimbalom. The music they played – a couple of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, Pablo de Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, even a delicious bit of sentimental drool by Brahms himself – may have been old friends, but the manner of performance, the insinuation in both rhythm and harmony, was so fresh, vital and captivating as to sound utterly new. There was nothing wrong with Fischer’s clear-headed, intelligent projection of the Brahms First after intermission, but it was obvious from the work’s first thudding, constipated C-minor chords that the evening’s fund of authentic ecstasy had come to an end.

The Pasadena’s Symphony’s Jorge Mester, of mixed Mexican and Hungarian ancestry, played the Hungarian card last weekend with the shards of the Viola Concerto left incomplete by Béla Bartók at his death and pieced together by several hands. Clouds of suspicion hang over the work; if its actual ——–
AUTHORship isn’t firmly established, its sounds represent some pretty good gestures of the music of its time and place. The world doesn’t have enough viola concertos, nor enough Bartók even ersatz, and the soloist, young Antoine Tamestit, made a convincing case for whatever it was that he performed. Shed a tear, however, for the Pasadena Symphony’s imperfect home, the Civic Auditorium, with its lousy acoustics downstairs and its life-threatening steepness upstairs – while the superior Ambassador Auditorium sits pathetically underused a few blocks away.

No sooner had I let loose a few snide words on the usual low level of Pulitzer
Prize–winning music, when word came of a genuinely excellent winner, Steven Stucky’s
Second Concerto for Orchestra. At the Philharmonic’s
premiere last March, I wrote of Stucky as “a composer with something to say, and
a pretty good handle on the language in which to say it,” and it’s nice to be
agreed with by distinguished judges. This is only the second Philharmonic commission
to cop a Pulitzer; Mel Powell’s Duplicates of 1990 was the first.

Historic Bites

When it comes to masterly programming, nobody need defer to MaryAnn Bonino and her “Chamber Music in Historic Sites,” going strong now for well over 30 years. Take this recent event: A sit-down dim sum dinner for 150 or so at Chinatown’s spacious Empress Pavilion (and never mind it being the wrong time of day) was followed, in another part of the same room, by musical dim sum, a program of short pieces for string quartet by Chinese composers plus Ravel, played by the four young Chinese-American siblings who constitute the Ying Quartet. Born in Chicago, trained at Eastman and united as a quartet since 1992, the Yings played beautifully, with a couple of short but strong pieces by Chen Yi and her husband, Zhou Long, as the concert-stealers and two exquisite bits from Ravel’s Quartet – dappled with gorgeous splotches of color no less Oriental than French – not far behind.

Vicki Ray’s recent “Piano Spheres” concert at Zipper was also all about those sight-versus-sound overlaps: short, lovely pieces from all over that drew upon visual inspirations, and David Rosenboom’s longer suite, Twilight Language, which evokes the gestures of 10th-century Tibetan artists. Vicki, too, plans programs with a knack for marvelous freeform artistry; what she draws from her piano always relates in wondrous ways to all the senses. At the end she joined with the splendid tenor Jonathan Mack in Poulenc’s charming song cycle, setting Paul Éluard’s poetry about seven painters: synesthesia writ large.

At LACMA, everybody’s favorite local soprano, Daisietta Kim, persuaded her colleagues
in Xtet to allow her Windup, a self-celebration of a lovely and varied
career in which she got to sing bits from her repertory (this and that, framed
within a Schubert song), with dancing, recitations, projected artwork – an olla
podrida of the many ways the remarkable Daisietta has found to enchant us over
the 28 years of her performance career so far. I can only hope that her title,
Windup, is to be taken in the sense of the star pitcher preparing for action;
any other interpretation would be beyond contemplation.

All in the Family

Over 18 years I’ve been fairly successful in avoiding Pacific Serenades, even though its programs are often attractively baited. This, in case you’ve been even luckier than I in dodging its expert press-agentry, is a movable chamber-music feast, four or five programs a year, repeated in small public venues and in private homes where elegant food is often served. The series is the vanity operation of Mark Carlson, a composer who has in the past been affiliated with UCLA. Over its years of operation, Pacific Serenades has given 18 world premieres of works by Mr. Carlson, although, judging from the works I’ve heard, another way of putting this is that the group has given world premieres of the same work 18 times. The list of donors includes nine Carlsons. Other solid, academic, conservative, eminently trustworthy UCLA composers whose names appear frequently on Pacific Serenades programs include Roger Bourland, Paul Reale, Ian Krouse and Paul Chihara. Hurrah for the C-major scale!

I mentioned bait. There must be money in the Pacific Serenades operation, because the performers are top rank. What finally got me to one of the concerts was the lure of two chamber works: Mozart’s G-minor Piano Quartet and Schumann’s Piano Quintet. The Philharmonic’s Joanne Pearce Martin was the pianist; Miwako Watanabe and Jim Dunham, of the long-lamented Sequoia Quartet, were the first violinist and violist; Connie Kupka and David Speltz rounded out the ensemble. The performance I got to was at the UCLA Faculty Club, a nice, intimate setting for chamber music, and the performances were superb. In the middle there was a new work, Collage, by 35-year-old Pasadena resident Peter Knell – faceless, aimless, harmless music, pure Pacific Serenades stuff as I’ve heard on their discs and, accidentally, elsewhere.

Apropos of discs: I made it a point to tune in on intermission conversations with notepad in hand. I heard the word sciatica 17 times.

THE LEVEL FIELD

Christian Zacharias’ midseason visits to the Philharmonic have a cleansing effect: the right music at the right time. His luggage is filled with 18th-century music: Mozart and Haydn and their pals, symphonies and concertos. He furloughs the orchestra’s heavy brass and the strings’ back-desk players; he stands among the musicians on floor level, not above them on a podium. The sense prevails of a benign chamber music writ large, and of musicianship of the highest order. Whatever he chooses to perform, familiar or not, becomes a discovery of delight.

This time he brought us two Mozart piano concertos, which he led from the keyboard: the early B-flat (No. 6 in the usual listing), with the 20-year-old composer simply spilling forth melodies from one elegant phrase to the next, and the F-major (No. 19) of only eight years later, subtle, mysterious, full of surprises around every turn. Framing these were two off-the-wall symphonies, neither well-known, both hovering at the outer expressive limits of what constituted the unstated rules of the “classical” – and, therefore, polite and predictable – usage of the day.

First came the early Haydn symphony (No. 31 of the 104), known as the “Horn-Signal,” whose forward momentum is subject to constant and hilarious disruption by a quartet of horns who sometimes join in the design but just as often obstreperously out-shout it. If we anchor our awareness of Haydn around the great dozen symphonies of his mature years, we miss the marvelous experimentation of the early symphonies, when his orchestra at the Esterházy Palace was like a sonic Erector set, a glorious toy for trying out all kinds of sonorities and forms. Aided no end by the Philharmonic’s intrepid brass contingent, Zacharias captured the essence of this remarkable work, both the soaring wood notes wild and the overall inventive exuberance. So did he, too, in the final work, a G-minor symphony by one Johann Vanhal, music from around 1770 drenched in the mood of Sturm und Drang (breast-clutching, fist-waving). The key of G minor seems to have been invented to allow 18th-century composers to let down their hair. Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 in that key – that great orchestral screech at the beginning of Amadeus — said it even better, and the great No. 40 said it the best of all.

LARGE RED STAR

Two concerts at LACMA last week afforded too-small audiences the chance to welcome back Antares, the enterprising New York chamber ensemble that first beguiled us in December 2003 and in the meantime has been gathering up virtually every chamber-music prize you can mention. The name refers to a large red star in Scorpio (or just as easily to the impressively red thatch of its pianist, Los Angeles–born Eric Huebner); the group seeks to build upon the meager repertory of music for violin, cello, clarinet and piano, through commissions or just by being so good. Since five of the seven works on the two programs were from the past decade, that repertory is not so meager as one might have thought.

Of particular interest, on their second program, was Paul Moravec’s Tempest Fantasy, the chance to sample what kind of music wins Pulitzer Prizes these days. Same kind as usual, I guess: thin, harmless, agreeable, forgettable. Mr. Moravec ladles out three movements describing characters in Shakespeare’s play, one devoted to the line about “sweet airs that give delight” and one a sort of hodgepodge on the music just heard. Music inspired by The Tempest that reflects more of this most precious of dramas’ magic than does this treacly flapdoodle by Moravec ranges from the recent opera by Thomas Adès to the suite of incidental pieces by Sibelius.

Actually, the music I found most attractive in these two concerts, to my surprise, was a 1938 quartet by Paul Hindemith. In general, I lean toward the Hindemith of the 1920s: sassy, sometimes even diabolical, inflamed by the newfangled jazz that was sweeping across Europe, bosom buddies with Schoenberg on one arm and Kurt Weill on the other. Then a soberer Hindemith takes over; the bright, sharp orchestral colors turn Brahmsian. Mathis der Maler becomes his Parsifal, but without the sex. In some ways this quartet is a kind of memoir, a throwback in the best sense to the vintage Hindemith style – not all the way to the opera of 1929 with its nude bathtub scene, but close. Its structural lines are strong and clear; it makes its points tersely, and with high artistry. I rushed home to scour my shelves but found no copy. Fortunately, Amazon had several as low as $1.25. O brave new world!

DREAM ON

Two weeks ago, the American Youth Symphony drew a full house at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for its gala program, what you might call an out-of-town tryout for its Carnegie Hall concert last weekend. Tickets went for $100. Veteran violinist, teacher and Philharmonic concertmaster Alexander Treger conducted; he took over the AYS from its founder, Mehli Mehta (daddy to Zubi), in 1998. There was some new music, Dreams and Whispers of Poseidon by the 32-year-old Russian-born Lera Auerbach (with well-remembered Philharmonic alumnus David Weiss on musical saw). Yundi Li, the latest Chinese whiz-bang to hit these shores, played a Chopin concerto. For the rest, spooned over the second half of the program like last week’s warmed-over kasha, there was the Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony.

At the post-concert dinner, young orchestral members spoke glowingly about playing in Carnegie Hall – even if buried among 100 orchestral colleagues – as the realization of a lifetime ambition. Board members bestowed awards upon one another and spoke of the vast privilege of transporting the Tchaikovsky Fifth cross-country, fulfilling a historic mission in the very hall where the great Tchaikovsky had led the same work 114 years before – as if the AYS had existed these 40 years for no other purpose.

Perhaps it doesn’t, anymore. Beyond all this money-backed pride is the sad reality
that the AYS is no longer the spirited enterprise of the Mehli Mehta days. Many
young musicians I have talked with tell me that the dropout rate is high, and
that a stint with the AYS is no longer the inevitable career move it once was.
Surely this level of soggy, unbalanced playing is not qualified to tour any farther
than, say, Glendale. I can only hope that those predatory New York critics found
something else to do last Saturday night.

Photo by Craig SchwartzGURGLE
Tan Dun flows endlessly on. The week that brought his Water Passion After St. Matthew to Disney Hall through the admirable efforts of Grant Gershon’s Master Chorale was also adorned by recent releases on Deutsche Grammophon DVD of two other major Tan works of high liquidity. One is Tea, an opera concerned with that beverage in its mythic significance to Tan’s own countrymen and their neighboring Japanese. The other is The Map, which is something of an audio/video voyage through Chinese geography and dance ritual morphed into a cello concerto, performed in this instance outdoors in a river village with adoring thousands on the banks, bathed in the pretty music and the words of self-adoration by its returning musical hero. In his nearly 20 years since fleeing the restrictive musical outlooks of his native China for the cultural liberation of the West, Tan Dun has not yet acquired all the skills of a first-rank composer, but he has certainly learned how to behave like one. Tan was one of the several composers who broke out of artistic bondage at the end of China’s “cultural revolution.” He came to New York in 1986 and seemed from the start awesomely adept in turning his Chinese background into both music and publicity. His interviews, including one or two that I’ve done, rattle on eloquently about a boyhood deprived of real music, finding messages in stones and sticks and the gurgling of water; so each of the three big pieces noted above and most everything else – including his Concerto for Paper Instruments, scheduled for the Philharmonic on April 28 – becomes yet another chapter in a Tan Dun audio-biography. Moments in the Water Passion, in fact, that did not involve stones and water and primitive percussion and vocal effects, but merely lyrical passages for chorus and instruments, were by far the evening’s dullest. Water Passion was one of four contemporary interpretations of the biblical Passion narrative (of which J.S. Bach himself had set two) commissioned by Helmuth Rilling and his International Bach Academy in 2000 for that composer’s 250th death anniversary. Four distinctive works eventuated: Wolfgang Rihm’s intensely Bachian; Sofia Gubaidulina’s ancient-Slavic-ritualistic; Osvaldo Golijov’s dazzling-Latino; and this of Tan Dun, most remote by far in its influences and certainly – with its assemblage of bowls of water and primitive and symphonic percussion, but also two solo strings, two vocalists, chorus and synthesizer – the most bizarre in sound. Matthew’s words are denied the harrowing flow of Bach’s setting; they go forward in short, disconnected soundbites, more as memory devices than as narration. The music, too, proceeds as a series of short explosions, a sequence of musical events not clearly related. The range of devices is vast and impressive; the vocalists – soprano Elizabeth Keusch and baritone Stephen Bryant in the Disney performance – are called upon to create, among other gullet tighteners, the extreme ranges of Tibetan “throat singers.” On its primitive level, the music builds at times to shattering and chilling climaxes: best of all the moment of the stoning of Jesus by the crowds at the Trial, when all 63 members of the Master Chorale broke out their handfuls of clickety-clack flat stones. Oh yes, the water. Tan’s Water Passion actually begins with chapters in Matthew several before Bach’s text, allowing the image of water as unification: baptism at the start, tears at the end, and a nice, drippy memento mori along the way. The end is in darkess, with 17 players stationed at that many bowls, spattering, dripping, sloshing and – after 95 intermissionless minutes – delivering a measure of agony to many an elderly prostate out front unreached by the compassion of St. Matthew.
SLURP
The music for Tea is by Tan, and he also co-wrote the libretto (with Xu Ying). Given its contemporary provenance, this is a rather attractive reconstruction of what we know – or what we want to know – about musical theater back in the 17th century in the inscrutable East. Its plot involves a rivalry; two men – one a Chinese prince, one a Japanese monk – struggle to prove the verity of the book on the meanings behind the traditional Tea Ceremony, for which the ancient Tea Sage must be located in a distant land. Lest this suggest a certain flimsiness of story substance, be reassured that there is plenty, including blood and weeping at the end. The opera was created for Tokyo’s Suntory Hall and the Netherlands Opera; it is also listed for the San Francisco Opera in 2006. The Netherlands’ Pierre Audi – who gave us that fabulous Monteverdi Ulysses some years back – directed, creating in what is basically a concert hall a remarkable stage setting with a few large planks laid at angles; let that be a lesson to whoever next tries to stage stuff at Disney. Somehow, this work comes across with a fullness of musical language that I find lacking in much of Tan’s work, including the Water Passion. He seems to know the peculiarities of Chinese vocal lines, the sinuous turns, the glottal punctuations, the strange shadings created by indigenous vowel sounds. His singers – two of them Chinese, three not – form a homogeneous ensemble, as does the usual mix of stones, water, etc., plus, this time, a full-size orchestra under Tan’s leadership. All told, I find this one of Tan’s closest-to-successful large-scale works, moving and rather beautiful. I also find it the one least affected by the “international” influences that have befallen him since his arrival in America. Perhaps someone should have confiscated his green card when there was time. Even without the “Aren’t you lucky that I’ve come back to you” hometown bushwa of the DVD of The Map, this is pure hokum: a piece that sets a solo cello to wailing Chinese operatic laments (Yo-Yo Ma in the Boston Symphony premiere, Anssi Karttunen on the DVD) against orchestral outbursts and Chinese travel movies on screens all around. I yield to nobody in my admiration for old National Geographics, and for Anssi Karttunen’s skill as a cellist, but I haven’t yet been able to get all the way through this piece of misguided entertainment, and am not sure I ever will.

WHOLLY MONSTROUS AND MAD Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (known to his friends as Max) lives on, at least in this country, but barely. His several symphonies, massive works that once enjoyed the attention of Simon Rattle, seem to have disappeared from the landscape. Some of his interesting dramatic works for mixed ensembles – e.g., Resurrection, for singers, orchestra, Salvation Army band and rock group – have apparently come and gone. The Fires of London, the extraordinary performance ensemble that toured and recorded his music in thrilling, close-to-the-bone performances, no longer exists. Two works remain popular in the U.S.: his film score to Ken Russell’s The Devils, so far available only on VHS, and his solo theater piece Eight Songs for a Mad King, which was brought forth at last week’s Jacaranda Concert at Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church in a performance that might modestly be described as stupendous. The “mad king” is, of course, our old friend George III, with Randolph Stow’s text a series of crazed monologues partially based on remembered words from the dotty monarch himself. Onto these manic recitations Davies affixed music of comparable vehemence, imposing on an interpreter a vast array of vocal demands – including a span of four-plus octaves – while allowing considerable theatrical freedom in the way those demands might be met. For last week’s performance at Jacaranda, an extraordinarily gifted singer/actor/acrobat/tragedian/clown named Dean Elzinga, previously unknown to me, met these demands with the force of Lord Nelson’s massed cannons, and delivered one of the most memorable solo turns of my recent memory. Arriving onstage in high hysteria, barely covered in a tattered hospital gown, then departing in silent tragedy half an hour later to a solemn drumbeat and a held low F on the cello, Elzinga shaped an astonishing gamut: searing, shocking and remarkable, too, in the absolute clarity of his diction even at the most piercing falsetto. Earlier in the evening he had forged another level of pleasure, in the wacko charm of HK Gruber’s “pan-demonium,” Frankenstein!! — music that, despite its composer’s best intentions, has worked its way out of the prescribed cabaret milieu and onto the concert stage. As cabaret, the nose thumbing is murderous and hilarious: Batman and Robin in bed together, Goldfinger vs. “Jimmy Bond,” Superman with his pants down – not all that removed from the subtle slashing of Mikel Rouse (see below). As a stage piece of innocent merriment, everybody loved the Robinson Crusoe song, which drew an encore. Participating in all this was the excellent young ensemble that has formed around these Jacaranda events, including the Denali Quartet, whose praises I have previously sung, and Mark Alan Hilt, the musical director who, with Patrick Scott, has dreamed up this whole series of resourceful, imaginative programs in this exceptionally pleasant Santa Monica venue. I’m sorry if I sound like a Jacaranda pitchman, which I’m not, but the impulse behind this series – and its fruition – is a pretty good case study in the way a musical community can be served, from within, by its members. The crowd last week was gratifyingly large and continues to grow, as it should. The next Jacaranda concert is listed for April 30. ROUSE, KROUSE In adjacent rooms in a UCLA theater complex last week, one could, on successive nights, sample the musical approximations of human banality and human carnality. Score one, this time around at least, for the humdrum. Mikel Rouse is not so much a man of the theater; he is the theater. A few years back, alone on another local stage with harmonica and guitar, he turned himself into a pair of Kansas murderers, their victims and their retribution. This time, in the Macgowan Little Theater, he and his tunes became Music for Minorities, the interlock of small points of view into which you and I and everyone we know somehow fit. His tunes achieve a simultaneous boredom and hypnosis. His video images – cast onto a screen behind him – are achingly everyday. He is like A Prairie Home Companion with cayenne instead of ketchup. Across the lobby, in the larger Freud Playhouse, self-indulgence reigned. There is a cookie-cutter sameness to UCLA’s composers, both its faculty and its graduates; it goes back generations. It is a music of slick derivativeness that gladdens trustees’ hearts and makes elderly alumni decide that this modern music isn’t so bad after all. The other night it made three hours of Puccini rewrite – by professor Ian Krouse, who is currently head of UCLA’s composition department – slide down easily, like warm Cream of Wheat with just the slightest dash of cinnamon. You left, however, hungry, bored, dissatisfied – perhaps even outraged. The language of this kind of audience-friendly music calls for great lyrical outpouring; instead, there is feeble gesture. The opera is Lorca, Child of the Moon, to a libretto by Margarita Galban, first composed in 1984, several times revised and left to gather dust in the intervening years, now finally staged (also by Galban). Its plotline finds the poet Lorca himself, wandering among episodes from three of his small tragic dramas, reaching out helplessly to their destroyed heroines, seeking ultimate solace in death. Pirandello? Whatever substance abides in Galban’s book is immediately canceled out by the drab, gadget-ridden music. I have seen commendable opera at UCLA in past years: a Rake’s Progress not at all bad, an excellent Falstaff, the two short Ravel operas as a delightful double bill. The opera program has had funding over the years from the Maxwell H. Gluck Foundation, all to the good. But what purpose is served, I have to ask, aside from the ego of its well-placed composer, to impose this work upon a large cast mostly student (orchestra and production crew likewise), tying up a considerable portion of their college career with a work that anyone with half an ear should recognize as doomed? What ever happened to the fine art of student protest?

CONVERSATIONS

Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony is so seldom played that every new hearing becomes a trove of rediscovered delights; so was it with the Philharmonic last week. The orchestra, just back from its weeklong conquest of Cologne (read the reviews if you doubt this), might have been entitled to some jet lag; perhaps it was the luxury of Beethoven’s orchestral language, and the enlivening guest leadership of Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, that forestalled this consequence.

The personality of Beethoven’s orchestral sonority per se is not often dealt with; I put forward the slow movement of the Fourth Symphony as containing the most seductive sounds in his entire legacy. They consist in the main of conversation among the winds, a solo clarinet (Michele Zukovsky’s the other night, pure rapture) answered by a somewhat more serious bassoon, a horn gently trying to change the subject, strings and even the timpani as concerned onlookers. The miracle – and I use this word advisedly – is compounded when you realize that this music dates from a time when Beethoven’s oncoming deafness had already begun its inroads. There is a small body of moments in Beethoven’s music, from around the time of this Fourth Symphony (Opus 60), that give off this particular kind of ecstasy; you shiver when you hear them, or should at any rate. I tend to grow weak-kneed, for example, during the slow movements of the first and second “Razumovsky” string quartets (Opus 59); the rhapsodic G-minor episode that intrudes upon the blandness in the first movement of the Violin Concerto (Opus 61) affects me the same.

There are other remarkable moments in the Fourth. Just the beginning, for example, tries out an effect new in Beethoven’s usage, but one he will employ again in other contexts later on: the notion of the music emerging out of a cloudy nowhere, one note at a time, with empty space in between, and then suddenly getting down to business with a mighty whoosh. (Twenty years later he will pull the same trick in the Ninth Symphony, and every good German composer – and some bad – from then on will follow that lead.) What is interesting, and delightful, in the Fourth is the way Beethoven, later on in the first movement, repeats that whole coming-from-nowhere process, much condensed but just as surprising the second time around.

The performance under Frühbeck was strong, beautifully detailed, respectful of Beethoven’s stipulated repeats and respectful, too, of the winged spirits that make of the final movement an entire wondrous library of joke books. The rest of the program had to be downhill; the second of Prokofiev’s two violin concertos is a rather drab business under any circumstances, although Alexander Treger dealt bravely with its convoluted patterns. Even so, I hadn’t expected to enjoy the two suites of Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat music that ended the program; instead, I kept wishing it wouldn’t end. In a lifetime of pop-concert and Hollywood Bowl performances, I have apparently missed the sizzling, diamond-hard orchestral language of the piece and, of course, the gorgeous, insinuating curvature of its rhythmic patterns. It doesn’t always follow that Spanish conductors can make this music work; ask any San Franciscan who remembers Enrique Jordá. But Frühbeck, in what couldn’t have been many days’ work after the European jaunt, got the Philharmonic to master his own accents to a remarkable degree. The sound of that music, in that hall, was something to roll around on your happiest receptors for hours afterward.

PAST MASTER

The death of Carlos Kleiber last year has activated the consciences of the media, leading to the issue or reissue of most of his recorded performances. Every one of these is essential not only for the strength of the insights that he brought to his chosen (if limited) repertory, but also for the amount of the man himself, the musician infused by music and by the act of making music, that both microphone and camera have been able to capture. You start with the two videos – on Sony and on Deutsche Grammophon – of the New Year’s Day concerts he led at Vienna’s Musikvereinsaal in 1989 and 1992. You are first held spellbound by the sheer gorgeousness of the room itself, the gold of its décor, then of the music that fills it – Vienna’s golden treasury of waltzes and the like – and by the smiling, delighted companionship of the man who is making it happen. There is a lot of folderol around about how musicians make music: about God moving the baton, or Beethoven coursing through the veins. The remarkable thing about watching Kleiber is the sense of easy companionship between him and the task at hand. The remarkable thing about listening to Kleiber is how much of this sense comes through.

The reissues include a CD on Deutsche Grammophon of Schubert’s early Third Symphony and the “Unfinished” in a performance that may leave you paralyzed for some ensuing minutes. The DVDs include Beethoven symphonies – the Fourth and Seventh – and a Mozart “Linz” Symphony so immediate that you fancy yourself onstage, feeling the phrases as they take shape. You’re also onstage, or so you feel yourself, in a Vienna performance of Die Fledermaus, supremely funny and supremely wise. There should also be a Rosenkavalier one of these days, if not already; he recorded it twice, and both versions were released on laserdisc. That was the only opera I saw him conduct in person. Lucky me.

Most remarkable among the Kleiber releases, however, on TDK, is a Carmen from the Vienna State Opera, never before released, with – get this – Elena Obraztsova as Carmen and Plácido Domingo as José, designed and directed by Franco Zeffirelli. The date: December 9, 1978. Above everything else – and “everything else” in this case includes Zeffirelli’s 500 co-workers and eight horses – this is the most nearly complete imprint of a Kleiber performance. The exigencies of 1978 TV production keep him visible for large time segments: molding drumbeats with his whole body, string passages with perhaps 40 fingers in the air, settling back to allow his orchestra – the Vienna Philharmonic, after all – to do what it knows to do. Domingo is youthful, ardent, and takes the B flat in the “Flower Song,” alas, at full volume; Obraztsova is coarser at times than I would have expected; Yuri Mazurok, the Escamillo, is splendidly stentorian. Zeffirelli’s production, need I add, abounds with pretty chorus boys out front; his Lillas Pastia Tavern might be the Grand Canyon. The bad version of Carmen is used, with sung dialogue and not a line left out. At Domingo’s L.A. Opera, at least, they cut.

BANG BANG

On comparing the body count before and after intermission at last Thursday’s concert, it was clear that the latest visit by the reigning superpianist Lang Lang, rather than the interesting orchestral offerings by the China Philharmonic Orchestra, had brought out the near-sellout crowd to UCLA’s Royce Hall. True, the performance before intermission by Mr. Lang² of Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody (plus one of Liszt’s Sonetti di Petrarca as encore) had sent out its share of musical skyrockets. Some, however – your scribe among them – might argue that the program’s real value lay elsewhere.

Most of our knowledge of contemporary Chinese music comes from the four exceptionally interesting musicians who made their way out of Beijing soon after the collapse of the Cultural Revolution and did their advanced compositional study in New York. There is a violinist named Chen Yi in the China Philharmonic, but she’s obviously not the same jolly, roly-poly lady whose tough, gritty compositions we know and admire. These youngsters from Beijing all looked like refugees from a Jenny Craig ad.

Under the able leadership of conductor Long Yu, the China Philharmonic showed its muscle at Royce in some rafter-rattling stuff by Rimsky-Korsakov and Bartók (his China-permeated Miraculous Mandarin). The homegrown offerings began with a pretty, old-fashioned piece by Hua Yanjun, who died in 1950: atmospheric music of little consequence. The second indigenous work, however, was of considerable stature, a song cycle by the 40-year-old Xiao Gang Ye bearing the title Das Lied auf der Erde and, thus, evocative even before a note is struck. Its text, indeed, is drawn from the same collection of ancient lyric poetry that – in German translations that bent their meanings somewhat away from their origins – elicited the great Das Lied von der Erde of Gustav Mahler. (Notice the difference: the Chinese “song from the Earth” against Mahler’s “song of the Earth.”)

It probably stretches a point to suggest that the contemporary Xiao Gang Ye, in this 20-minute cycle of five songs for soprano and orchestra, has returned Mahler’s poetry to its source. Yet the relationship between the two works is fascinating, and so is Xiao Gang Ye’s music: shot through with bright bursts of color and emotional warmth. It breaks through no stylistic boundaries. It may be significant, however, to compare these substantial, well-schooled but basically old-fashioned musical manners with the kick-butt music of Chen Yi and her American-trained “Gang of Four” colleagues, who broke out of their Chinese upbringing so dramatically and acquired their musical manners half a planet away.

As for the proficient and highly decorative Lang², concerns about musical manners still lie concealed behind an ample trick repertory in which the Rachmaninoff Paganini Rhapsody fairly gleams by virtue of brevity and superior invention. Musicality mattered less on this occasion; dimples more. Next season he drops in on our own Philharmonic with Bartók’s Second Concerto; that’s a step forward.

ANOTHER COAST

To LACMA’s Bing Theater, with music from elsewhere in the world, came the New York New Music Ensemble, excellent and frequent visitors. The Bang on a Can folks had visited David Lang’s Cheating, Lying, Stealing upon us earlier this season; time does not soften its jerks, false starts and general juvenilia. Magnus Lindberg’s Ablauf, for somewhat the same instrumentation (clarinet and aggressive percussion) did the same things but on a grown-up level. Most of the program, in fact, consisted of workings-out of unlikely combinations of melodic instruments and percussion, including an uncommonly likable piece by Dorrance Stalvey – Exordium, Genesis, Dawn, now 15 years old but new to me. The one work “normally” scored, the 1971 Piano Trio by Britain’s Jonathan Harvey, seemed so much weak tea in such energetic company.

Too few people seem aware of the extraordinary contribution Dorrance Stalvey has made to our musical life, carrying on the pioneering efforts of these Monday Evening Concerts, which date back to 1939 and have given this city a backbone of awareness of music for small performing forces – very new, very old, set forth on a consistently high level that few communities can match in this country or in many others. Since 1971 (34 years!), Stalvey has planned and guided these concerts virtually single-handedly, with minimal financial support from the museum and only half a page’s worth of outside donors. He is also a composer of considerably above-average competence, and the least, you’d think, would be that he’d insist on having a piece of his on every other program over the years. But no; he has been too busy running this remarkable concert series, bringing in new-music groups from New York, string quartets from Paris, Terry Riley from up in the mountains. He turns 75 this year (next August), and in his honor several of the museum programs include his music. It’s about time.

FANTASTIC

Not many performers, and even fewer writers, bother much with Ferruccio Busoni these days; Alfred Brendel is a noble exception. Of Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica, “that monumental fusion of thesis and antithesis, of counterpoint and fantasy, Bach and Busoni, that confrontation of an infinitely subtle range of keyboard colors with a Baroque-style independence from tone-color,” Brendel recommends “a thorough study.” A student of this work, he suggests, “may find himself transported into a novel sphere of instrumental art.” To those willing to trust Brendel’s words (as I always am), and armed with a fair supply of courage and patience, Busoni’s work does yield its rewards; Susan Svrcek and Mark Robson reaped them at the last “Piano Spheres” concert at Zipper, in Busoni’s edition for two pianos. (The work comes in several versions; Brendel himself recorded it as a solo early in his career, although that may require something of a search.) What the work is, is a mammoth (half-hour-plus) meditation on the music that Bach left unwritten on his deathbed, The Art of the Fugue. If that sounds vague, it has been clearly expressed, and so was the performance.

Photo by Josef AstorBIT BY BIT Thirty-three short pieces made up the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra’s program at Disney Hall last week: 29 orchestral bits by Rameau and Handel, and four Handel arias. I would not have spared a single one. There is something immensely joyous in the way both these composers employed their orchestral forces to tickle the fancies of their aristocratic audiences – and, more to the point, their pleasure-loving monarchs (Rameau’s Louis XV and Handel’s George I). Their music throbbed in dance rhythms, and the sounds themselves seemed to dance: the roulades for flutes and oboes, the daring leaps into midair for the horns, the fanciful treads for the strings, the solid anchoring chords from the keyboard. The Philharmonia Baroque, Bay Area–based, was one of the first ensembles on this coast to seek out the historically correct way of performing this music. The Berkeley hills in my grad-student days were alive with the sound of music: early-music making on harpsichords and clavichords from build-it-yourself kits, recorders and sackbuts brought home from European shops by the first generations of Fulbright scholars, horns without valves and therefore as treacherous to play upon as those at last week’s concert. Lively and ambitious musicians – the name of harpsichordist Laurette Goldberg remains in my memory – assembled the first Philharmonia Baroque in 1981; the English-born Nicholas McGegan came on a few years later, and the ensemble grew (in quality, that is, and, therefore, in fame). Several years ago they tried a concert series here at the County Museum that fizzled because of poor attendance; last week’s concert, in a hall three times the size, was very nearly sold out. McGegan, part hobbit and part wizard, is great fun to watch, as he doesn’t so much conduct as re-enact the music. His arms sweep around it in a giant bear hug, but the smallness of his frame enables him at times to disappear inside its glowing splendor. The program ended with one of the three suites that make up Handel’s Water Music, the one that ends with the hornpipe that sounds like a toy version of an Elgar Pomp and Circumstance of many decades later. Something in McGegan’s performance, at once grandiose and respectful, managed to reconstruct that bridge across the time span. Lisa Saffer was the evening’s soloist, bright-voiced and virtuosically sure. She is, like McGegan, an artist exceptionally adept in crossing time bridges. Her four Handel arias ranged from the deeply pathetic side of that composer’s work that we are only now properly honoring (“Se pietà” from Giulio Cesare) to the delicious goofiness of the “Sweet Bird” duet (from L’ Allegro) with flutist Stephen Schultz. The orchestra as heard here (lacking trumpets) numbered 36, larger than our Musica Angelica, but a good size to resound handsomely in Disney’s welcoming space. (Among its members is the violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock, who also plays with Angelica.) I can only hope that the turnout last week, and the response, signals more frequent visits for this excellent group and its greatly imaginative, cuddly conductor. They have been missed. TROUBLED SLEEP I am not at all sure whether the coupling of a piece called Insomnia and a 65-minute Bruckner symphony carried some deep soporific significance, but I’m willing to let the matter pass lacking further confirmation. The right of exit and re-entry during performances of Bruckner symphonies remains my prerogative, however, which I tend to exercise less often for the Seventh than for certain other symphonies in the canon. I remember being wide-awake for the tuba’s held C sharp at the end of the slow movement this time, and considering it one of the most beautiful sounds yet heard on the Disney Hall stage. Insomnia, composed in 2002, brought to a close the Philharmonic’s “3 x Salonen” minifest. Salonen had conducted it in a guest shot in San Francisco, and it’s also on the new DG disc with the Finnish Radio Orchestra, but now it’s an “official” work, and so much the better. The scoring includes four Wagner tubas, which makes it a fit program competitor (and, for my money, a shoo-in winner) for Bruckner. It doesn’t need that kind of skid grease; it’s a great work on its own. Salonen’s notes for the piece breathe menace and fear: not the nocturnal fantasies of Chopin or of the “Lord Chancellor’s Nightmare” of GS, but of demons and machines and imprisonment. The dark-toned brass rumble and thud; the momentum holds you not by your breath, but by the scruff of your neck. Even the ending is ironic and bitter. The music quiets down, and the sunrise dispels the procession of nighttime torments; maybe now you can get to sleep, but it’s too late. The three Salonen works played during February date from 2000 to 2003, a pin drop in a composer’s life span. (Another work, Giro from 1982, revised 1997, was played during the month by the American Youth Symphony.) They are alike in outline – each lasts something like 25 minutes – and while the cello concerto, Mania, used a somewhat cut-down orchestra, all are aimed at a symphonic context. The real resemblance is on a higher level, however; each in its own way is the work of a composer with an extraordinary sense of what an orchestra can produce, what sonorities can arise from combinations and – most crucial – what lines of counterpoint are defined by which instruments. Each of these works sets about dealing with this matter in a distinctive way. So did the 1997 LA Variations, Salonen’s touchstone composition. Every time I hear that music, which is often, I am amazed all over again at how much of the inner workings of the variation process Salonen makes clear by his instrumental choices. Then there is some of this same technique, which seems to unfold in the teeth of a Pacific typhoon, in Wing on Wing, which is on the whole a lighter piece. In Mania it rides on the astonishment of the soloist’s virtuosity – Anssi Karttunen, not just a concert cellist but a Salonen surrogate in this instance. And in Insomnia the music grinds its way under the skin of each of us, leaving us so transfixed that even if the next piece on the program were something more substantial than Bruckner’s pathetic gesticulations, it wouldn’t matter.

A MANY-FINGERED THING
Emanuel Ax (who likes to be called “Manny”) has been in our
midst quite a lot this season, to our great pleasure and, I hope, his. At the
Disney Hall first-night gala he turned up with five pianist buddies, in a piece
too ludicrous to write about seriously but great fun nevertheless: the multicomposer,
multiperformer piano escapade called Hexaméron cooked up by Franz Liszt
and his pals in a frenzy of romantic hubris. Then he was back with sterner stuff,
Beethoven cello sonatas with Yo-Yo Ma at Royce Hall. This month he has been practically
living at Disney: in some rare and better-forgotten early Debussy with the Philharmonic,
in a chamber concert with orchestra members, and in more Debussy – ravishing,
this time – in last week’s Green Umbrella. He returns on March 23, with Yefim
Bronfman in a two-piano program that includes even more Debussy, the wonderful
and rarely heard suite En Blanc et Noir.
I would not have typed Manny Ax, this outgoing, chunky, Polish-born woolly bear, as a performer of Debussy. When I was asked to do notes for his early recordings I was bowled over by his larger-than-life Chopin, and that’s where I thought he was going. Now he is one of the most loving and considerate of all chamber-music participants, and his Debussy these past couple of weeks has been full of the soft lights and shades and half-tones that I remember from one or two Walter Gieseking recitals during my student year in Paris and from not many people since. He even brought this superb coloristic command to a piece that didn’t deserve it, the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra that Debussy scribbled down during his student days – formula music more suggestive of a second-rate Chausson, say, than of the composer who would soon thereafter rise to Afternoon of a Faun, his very next work. The Umbrella program bore that overused-of-late imprint: not just a “concert” but a “project” – Debussy, as with the recent Tristan, enthroned among the music he may (or may not) have made happen. Project or no, the three sonatas that were Debussy’s final works make a fascinating statement when heard together: wise, reflective, sardonic now and then, not a wasted note. All are differently scored, so they don’t often get programmed together; this was a rare and welcome chance. The piece for flute, viola and harp might be a bit of sea mist left over from La Mer; the Cello Sonata has some of Debussy’s longtime regard for African and Asian rhythms; the Violin Sonata, best and best-known of the three and Debussy’s last completed work, tells me something new, profound and witty on every hearing. Interspersed were two new works over which Debussy’s shadows occasionally play: haunting, dark music for low strings and piano in a trio by Kaija Saariaho, and a Steven Stucky sonata for oboe, horn and harpsichord – a nice companion to the elegant piece for recorder he gave us a couple of years ago, which I long to hear again. To name the participants in this exceptionally euphoric concert would be to reproduce a large chunk of the Philharmonic roster; better to say that everyone involved – including Manny Ax on both piano and, despite his cute and surely unmeant protest, harpsichord – made the capacity crowd at Disney Hall most of all aware of and, apparently, happy at the splendor of the music itself. MEANWHILE . . . So many concerts, so little space. It was understandable that David Daniels, the excellent countertenor, might try to climb out of the limited repertory of Handelian warriors and make his way in a wider world, but there were things wrong at his Royce Hall recital early this month that were matters not of musical ability but of judgment. His choice of Martin Katz as accompanist was certainly wise; Katz has a particularly distinguished career with singers in Daniels’ range (Marilyn Horne, Janet Baker). But Daniels, for all the beauty of his tone, lacks their carrying power, and he was outshouted all evening by Katz’s 9-foot grand piano resounding on the Royce Hall stage. In more intimate circumstances, the fact of Daniels’ attempt to move into later kinds of music – romantic songs, mildly contemporary stuff – might have seemed less out of place. This time, however, nothing worked. Over at the County Museum, the EAR Unit concert originally scheduled for January 10, wiped out on that date by mudslides, finally dug itself out four weeks later, sort of. What I mean is, the music got played, but it didn’t completely dig itself out. David Lang’s 40-ish-minute piece called Child remained buried in self-deprecating program notes (“overly subtle,” “more interesting”). Steven Mosko’s J came along with an elaborate dissertation on a druid alphabet whose letters relate to members of the EAR Unit. Only the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür sent along some words that placed his musical thinking anywhere in the scheme of things. “I am very interested in a combination of opposites,” wrote Mr. Tüür, “especially in the way they change from one to another.” And so are we all. Verbiage aside, it was one of those lively, enterprising EAR Unit concerts, sparked by the ongoing sense that these people are really driven by a joy in what they do. Lang remains an enigma or, if you will, something of a brat; he has a way of preying on one’s patience, and this new (2003) work surely does that. Then there is a turn, a percussion moment, an elegiac line for cello, and you know that you’re in the presence of a composer. “Lucky” Mosko the same, except for the brat part; his piece, which also dates from 2003, is serious, well constructed, not a moment too long. And in the Architectonics VII of Tüür, alas, I heard nothing but what his note promised: opposites changing. Maybe there’s something in this program-note stuff after all. The last Chamber Orchestra concert began with a Haydn symphony (No. 96), music which Jeffrey Kahane conducts as well as anyone around. Then David Finckel, sometimes of the Emerson Quartet, played the bejesus out of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto – extraordinary, angry, sardonic music that raises every hair on the back of your neck and which Finckel plays as if it does the same for him. Finally came weak tea: the Beethoven “Triple” Concerto, with Finckel’s wife, Wu Han, at the piano and LACO violinist Margaret Batjer. I thought, maybe out of kindness to Beethoven they could have reversed the order. Then I thought, after that performance of the Shostakovich I’d probably have had to go out and kick somebody, and so would we all.

ESA-PEKKA IN EXCELSIS

If anyone needed further confirmation of the strengths of Esa-Pekka Salonen, and his success in sharing those strengths with the musical life of this city, the events of the past week should answer any lingering questions. Those events included performances with the Philharmonic of huge and demanding orchestral works familiar and otherwise, and other works of high quality composed by Salonen himself. There was also a personal affirmation by Salonen, in the presence of well-fed members of the local and national press at a well-laid brunch, that – contrary to the much-reported attitudes of other symphonic conductors toward their managements, their orchestral players and their public – Maestro Salonen apparently likes life in Los Angeles and is willing to keep at it for another term of contract, maybe more. Imagine: A happy conductor; what will they think of next?

All of this, along with the announcement of next season’s musical fare, which immeasurably enriched the state of mind at the aforementioned gathering of press freeloaders, adds up to thrilling news – the more so in the face of the outpourings of doom ‘n’ gloom from many of the musical establishments beyond the mountains: James Levine’s ill health in Boston, Lorin Maazel’s lousy press in New York, acoustics in Philadelphia’s new hall. (Only Cleveland’s orchestra, apparently, thrives – for anyone, that is, who might want to live in Cleveland.)

Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder began Salonen’s wonder week, with its four harps downstage, 10 horns up back and other performing forces of comparable size. The work survives on its composer’s name; it throbs with the visionary monumental bloat that came into the Germanic musical language (and, fortunately, soon departed) right around the turn to the 20th century, leaving such works as this, the Mahler 8th and certain unmentionables by the likes of the Franz boys Schreker and Schmidt in its wake. There are beautiful moments among the love songs that make up the long first part, and the immensely sad contralto aria for the “Wood Dove,” which Lilli Paasikivi sang most touchingly, has a separate life as a concert piece. Salonen’s orchestra, deep and rich and bone-shaking, howled wondrously into every cranny of the hall, and Grant Gershon’s Master Chorale provided the proper added demonry. Two of the three performances were closed affairs, for the visiting members of a choral directors’ conference, which was curious since the big choral numbers in the piece come only at the end (which, to these ears, couldn’t have come too soon).

SIGNATURE TUNES

More convincing demons danced later in the week, on two programs with what might now be reckoned as Salonen signature tunes: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on Thursday and the Berlioz Fantastique on Saturday (in preparation for the orchestra’s next European tour). Both flourish under Salonen’s leadership. There is something in his unfolding of the opening measures of the Stravinsky, the hard-edged platelets of wind tone gradually moving apart and upward into Frank Gehry’s clear air space, that has come to define for me, in a microcosm, everything good about this hall – and the people who work in it. The Berlioz was no less marvelous: the thrusting string tone at the start, the phenomenal urging of the summoning bell at the end (but why was it moved offstage this year?). One complaint: Salonen left out the repeats this time. He shouldn’t have; every note of his performance is precious.

The real matter at hand on these two programs and a third one yet to come (on February 24) is the beautifully designed, well-fitting second hat worn by Salonen himself as one of our times’ major, serious composers. Conductors who compose are nothing new on the landscape. Elephantine bloats by the likes of Wilhelm Furtwängler and Bruno Walter belong among the sorry items cited two paragraphs ago; Leonard Bernstein’s symphonic ventures will gather dust while his stage shows continue to flourish. Salonen came to Los Angeles with a commendable repertory of a young man’s smart, craftsmanlike pieces that showed the touch of good teaching and good companionship. His music since his arrival has taken enormous forward strides; it is some of the most important music being composed anywhere in the world today, and the remarkable thing is that it gets better right along with his strengths as a conductor.

The L.A. Variations of 1997 was his giant step; it is now a repertory piece. It is the work of a master of orchestral practice, a knowing testimonial to the excellent state to which he had brought his own orchestra at that time. But it is also a work of musical mastery, a process piece that holds you in its grip as the variations unfold. The three works on the current “3 x Salonen” Mini-Festival follow logically. (I heard the first two, Wing on Wing and Mania, at last week’s concerts, and Insomnia — which is on the third program – from the new Deutsche Grammophon recording.)

Wing on Wing was wonderful to hear again live, breezing through the same hall and through the musical forces for which it was written, saddening to hear in its inferior preservation with its cramped, studio sound on the D.G. disc. I love its sparkle, its cold, clear wind. Wherever it may travel, with its amiable intrusions by the sampled voice of Frank Gehry, it remains our piece, Disney Hall’s piece, lightest of this “festival’s” three works, but a treasure. Mania draws the phenomenal cellist Anssi Karttunen into the mix, removing most of the orchestra (strings, especially) from his manic path.

When I first interviewed Salonen, soon after he began his career here, he seemed anxious to downplay the image of Sibelius, as Grandpa in the attic, the dark secret borne by all living Finnish musicians. The sense I get, in both Mania and the imperfect hearing of the thrilling Insomnia on disc (which I will write about again after the live performance) is that Salonen has found a way to extract at least one valuable aspect of Sibelius’ orchestral style, the wonderful headlong dash in, for example, the end of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony or again in the Seventh. Both these new pieces, it occurs to me on early acquaintance, seem to have found the way to make Grandpa respectable once again in polite society. That takes some doing.