So I've Heard

GOLD-SPUTTERED MASTERY

The eloquent blurb writers at Naxos, the little record label that could, have been lighting the sky lately with pronouncements on their latest reissued treasure, the first-ever recording (or so they say) of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, newly dusted off to join the 80 or so versions of that much-loved work already on the market. The violinist, also much loved, is the late Louis Kaufman; the performance dates from 1947, and its reappearance at this time has been enough to send me scurrying back into history – especially the performance history of the work itself, which is somewhat remarkable. This recording, by the way, is on the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry as the “first LP recording” of Vivaldi’s elegant conceit, a notation that might merit some revision.

Let’s start around 1920. Even in Vivaldi’s native Italy, almost nothing was known of his music at that time: a few overarranged pages from concertos, a few arias from his operas. Several Italian musicians, however, became obsessed with implanting a native persona in their musical life, to set it apart from the heavy German influence. One of the first things they did was to exhume these four unknown Vivaldi concertos and publish them – in a version for (!) piano duet. In 1927, the highly regarded conductor Bernardino Molinari (who later was to become the teacher of Carlo Maria Giulini) fashioned his orchestration of The Four Seasons, making sure to dedicate it, with all the proper Italianate flourishes, to Benito Mussolini as testimony to the rebirth of Italy’s pride in its grand orchestral heritage. That version, with full symphonic-size string sections (16 first violins), organ, grand pianos doctored to sound like harpsichords, harps, and a violin soloist well versed in the expressive methods of Italian bel canto at its weepiest, found its way to records in 1942 – six 78-rpm discs on the CETRA label. You can still buy it on CD online – at least I did, last month – on the Aura-Music label, and it’s a hoot.

And that, friends, was the first-ever recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. It was already in circulation when Louis Kaufman made his (also on six 78s); I know, because I worked for the importer, in New York, at the time. Kaufman, a well-known studio musician on both coasts and a respected concert artist as well, recorded his performance on the Concert Hall Society label, an upscale producer (“discs pressed from gold-sputtered masters”), with a small orchestra conducted by Henry Swoboda. Then and now, the project lay claim to representing the “authentic” Vivaldi (as opposed to the Colosseum-size Molinari Vivaldi), but it is no such thing. Kaufman’s solo performance has the same inauthentic juiciness – sliding into notes, slowing down at the ends of phrases – as his predecessor’s. When either of them takes on the slow movement of “Winter,” you can almost hear Andrea Bocelli wailing out that gorgeous tune. The orchestra under Swoboda lacks clarity; a harpsichord is credited in the notes, but I don’t hear it; and I think that? that’s a (horror!) harp in the slow movement of “Autumn.” (Both recordings, by the way, were reissued on LP in the U.S. in 1950.)

Don’t blame Louis Kaufman. What he delivers is a beautiful rendition of the historically uninformed way violinists were performing Vivaldi, Corelli and the rest of the Baroque orchestral repertory in 1947. A year later Renato Fasano, who had succeeded Molinari at the Santa Cecilia Academy in Rome, founded the first “authentic” ensemble for this music. His Virtuosi di Roma opened people’s ears to smaller, cleaner sounds, initiated the “Baroque Revival” that still goes on, and led eventually to the 80 Four Seasons, etc.? recordings now at your local discothèque.

FIDDLE-FADDLE

A generation before Vivaldi, and far to the north, the violin had come into its own as an expressive and virtuosic instrument to rival the human voice. Salzburg’s Heinrich Biber (1644 1704) is the new star on the charts; two recent discs of his music for solo violin, riding high and wild above a supporting organ and/or harpsichord, fill your ears with vast torrents of sound. On a two-disc Harmonia Mundi set, Andrew Manze plays Biber’s Rosary Sonatas, 15 short works whose titles carry you through the “mysteries” of Christian faith from the Annunciation to the Life of Jesus to the Resurrection and the Assumption, each short work a tense, fabulously beautiful meditation or outcry. On an ECM disc no less irresistible, John Holloway traces Biber’s depiction, with fanfares and whooshing onslaughts in ecstatic virtuosity, of the Turkish invasion of Austria, the siege at Vienna and the ultimate victory of Christians over the infidel invaders.

The notion of entrusting all this to a solo violin may strike you as naive, especially since Biber took great care to inscribe in his manuscripts the exact identification for every episode in his musical retelling; in this regard, his work prefigures the charming lines of poetry that Vivaldi inscribed along with his Seasons. What delights me in this music is the sense of trying things out. The violin itself was new at the time; the great Italian makers were just then sending their wares throughout Europe. Biber and his colleagues messed around with experimental tunings – scordatura, later to be used by Mahler and many others – which allowed them unusual harmonic shadings. Both these performers, consummate Brits in whom the spirit of exploration burns bright, capture in their playing a sense of the creative joy that must have gone into these oddball little pieces at the start. This may be the world’s first over-the-top music, and the playing matches it marvelously well.

Back another two centuries, there was Antoine Busnois (boon-WAH, d. 1492), principally employed at the Burgundian court. He is newly celebrated by a disc on Harmonia Mundi of essential, unearthly beauty: songs, motets and a Mass. This is early Renaissance counterpoint; listening from one early work of his to another of later date is like watching an organism hatch in a petri dish. The harmonic sense emerges, the dominant-to-tonic cadences begin to sound like other music we know. But the older pieces have their own beauty: the way lines of counterpoint twist around one another to form a rich if tangled fabric. The very distance of these harmonies from more familiar territory (Palestrina, say) suggests the outlines of the church of St. Sauveur at Bruges, whose vastness the music of Busnois once filled. Performances are by the Orlando Consort, a men’s quartet that sang here a couple of weeks ago in one of the “Historic Sites” concerts that my own tangled fabric of a schedule made unreachable. This disc is fair recompense.

Photo by Robert MillardMUD AND SUGAR If there must be Gounod – a point I will argue – let it be thus. The mud and sugar of his Roméo et Juliette do not entirely disappear behind the splendor of the L.A. Opera’s performance, but that night at the opera is, indeed, a dream happenstance. If you come away more oppressed by humidity than by heat, the fault resides in the opera’s original formulators, not in the team currently at work at the Music Center. They have done their work well. Anna Netrebko sings the Juliet, and what comes out – most of all in her Waltz number, which is the only tune anyone remembers from this very long opera – is the stuff of moonbeams. Rolando Villazón, the Romeo, is a dreamboat who sings like an angel while climbing ladders onto balconies and into hearts. There’s a scene in bed, with paired bare abs and pecs all agleam in dawn’s early light; yum. Marc Barrard sings of Queen Mab, trippingly and with high delight; Suzanna Guzman is a delightfully crusty Nurse in the few lines the creators have left her; Anna-Maria Panzarella steals a small scene in the song for Stephano (Balthasar in Shakespeare). John Gunter designed the sets, a cluster of multilevel, movable scaffold units that create interesting crowd spaces for showing off Tim Goodchild’s opulent period costumes. Director Ian Judge, an L.A. Opera stalwart, moves people around with fine intelligence; I particularly admire the way he lets the Act 3 fight gradually emerge out of the crowd. Conductor Frédéric Chaslin, new to the company, is French; that means, I suppose, that he has mastered the art of conducting without embarrassment the astonishingly large repertory of bad romantic music by his countrymen, to which Gounod supplied a fair amount. And yet I read, in the words of ——–
AUTHORs I admire, words like exquisite in writings about Roméo et Juliette — though never, of course, about Gounod’s Faust, toward which even the most optimistic have abandoned hope. Re Faust, however, I do admire Joseph Kerman’s “pastel timidities,” and I think that the “timidity” problem, in whatever color intensity, underlies this later opera as well. Nothing soars; the ecstasy, the urgency behind Romeo’s “Ah, lève-toi, soleil” at the start of the Balcony Scene, is clipped as the tune itself falters. (Even Tony’s “Maria,” in the comparable spot in West Side Story, flies higher.) And that is the start of Gounod’s sad catalog. In New York I used to get letters from a “Society To Prevent Cruelty to Gounod,” which I think was formed solely to do me battle. I wonder if it’s still around. SMALLER PLEASURES Chamber music, most of it homegrown, flourished especially well during January. The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, conductorless for once, wasted 10 or so minutes of everybody’s time with Joel McNeely’s Two Portraits, composed by Mr. McNeely – a proficient creator of film scores, I’m told – for his wife, the LACO’s first violinist, Margaret Batjer. I haven’t seen any McNeely films – which include Holes and Ghosts of the Abyss — but I can guess that he has developed a fair expertise at his craft, and another fair expertise at tearing off swatches of his musical wallpaper and passing them off as serious music when the urge is upon him. The evening’s high point, and it was very high, was an elegant performance of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, in its original scoring for 13 players, sweetly led by Ms. Batjer from the first violinist’s chair and gorgeously lit by the solo oboe of Allan Vogel and the clarinet of Gary Gray. At such times, LACO remains unsurpassable. Earlier in the month, Santa Monica’s Jacaranda concerts came up with yet another of their exceptionally rewarding, brainy events, a Latino affair culminating in all four of the string quartets by the troubled and still grossly undervalued Silvestre Revueltas: 45 minutes of music composed in a grand whoosh (around 1930-31) and probably demanding to be performed that way. There are sags; the throb of a life colored by alcohol and political conscience pulls the music this way and that. The final music, full of fiesta sounds and yet tragic, is thrilling. The splendid young Denali Quartet, who have had to reconstruct, even re-imagine, the music from incomplete published sources, made it their own at the end of a knockout program that also included a percussion segment, with Varèse’s Ionisation gloriously blasting against the walls of Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian. Very much like Jacaranda – in fact, sharing some of its performers – is Mládí, which has been going now for four years but which I only discovered last weekend. The name is Bohemian for “Youth”; the aim, once again, is to develop a chamber-music awareness in Los Angeles, with the widest possible repertory and with a generation of devoted young players who, above all, seek an alternative to the inevitable New York destiny. Most concerts are in the acoustically spectacular lobby of the famous old Los Altos Apartments on Wilshire, where Patty Hearst’s apartment is now a museum. The room seats about 100. Residents occasionally walk through, some with dogs; a fire crackles; there is wine and coffee. It’s a real chamber-music venue, in other words. Last week’s program included Bernard Herrmann’s garrulous Souvenirs du Voyage and Darius Milhaud’s elegant wind quintet about King René’s chimney. Mládí’s next concert is March 26. The new work was Alex Shapiro’s Current Events, which was receiving its second performance hereabouts and deserves circulation. Her title, by the way, refers to her hobby, which has something to do with “communing with the sea life at tide pools.” It’s music exceptionally well made if fairly low on surprises; I found it most attractive, especially in a long, beautifully unfolding slow movement. In her pre-performance talk she kept invoking the ghost of Brahms, but I think she sold herself short on that count; her string scoring had little of the thickness with which the good Doktor was often given to burying his best thoughts. I wonder if he ever caught the romance of a tide pool. Obiter Dictum: I suppose I am expected to say something about Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony and the Mahler Ninth, just to stop being cornered. I found it to be a performance of MTT performing the Mahler Ninth. Far into the next night I listened to Bruno Walter’s performance with the Vienna Philharmonic (which has just been reissued by EMI), re-read Lewis Thomas’ Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, and eventually felt both worse and better.

Photo by Robert MillardTHE THEATRICAL DIMENSION Nearly a century separates the two beguilements installed at the Music Center
in recent weeks: Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida of the 1870s and Luciano Berio’s
Laborintus II of 1965. Nobody would mistake the style or purpose
of the one for the other; they are both shrewdly welded to the taste of their
respective times. Something grander links them – an innately Italian sense of
theater that unites all the arts of the region into a single onrush of word, music
and movement. To the north, Richard Wagner made a great fuss as he dreamed up
his “total artwork” concept with ream upon ream of explanatory philosophy. To
the Italian spirit, that unity of the expressive arts was simply a form of breathing.
Petrarch, Monteverdi, Tintoretto, Berio . . . just the names by themselves take
on a theatrical dimension.
Laborintus II is Berio’s love letter to language, one of many. Edoardo
Sanguineti is the poet; this was his second Laborintus. He is not so much
a collaborator as an alter ego, sharing the same skin; his words are a free-associative
ragout. Dante bubbles up – the piece was occasioned by that poet’s 700th anniversary
– and so do Ezra Pound, biblical phrases, gibberish and Sanguineti’s own words.
The music is their match; it ranges freely over a broad spectrum of Berio’s concerns.
Three years later he would create the most famous of his combinative works, the
third movement of his Sinfonia; the bursting energy of that spellbinding
conception is already here. No other two works that survive the ’60s define that
wondrous era more forcefully. Try to find the recording on Harmonia Mundi’s Musique
d’Abord label, conducted by Berio and with Sanguineti himself delivering the poetry,
sly, insinuating and wise. What’s more, the lead singer is the great Christiane
Legrand of the original Swingle Singers, who first brought Sinfonia to
life.
At Disney Hall, Esa-Pekka Salonen began the latest “Green Umbrella” concert with
music of his own – Memoria, a brief, slight, charming wind quintet written
for Salonen’s own new-music ensemble in Helsinki. The ghosts of Debussy, perhaps
also of Berio, sweep across; the writing for horn (Salonen’s own instrument, here
played by Elizabeth Cook-Shen) is uncommonly eloquent. Colin Matthews’ Continuum
followed, in its U.S. premiere – tortuous, desiccated settings of two Eugenio
Montale poems (sung by Janice Felty, barely audible through thick scoring). Then
came the Berio to raise the roof and the spirits. Some deplored the excess of
local accent in the roof raising, and it is true that neither William Stone’s
reading nor Hila Plitmann’s coloratura hysteria quite caught the authentic Italianate
whoopee of bygone days – when, for example, the set for Sanguineti’s own staging
at La Scala consisted of undulating penises. I had a great time at Laborintus
II, and I’m sorry if you didn’t.
THE REAL AIDA
Given the best-of-all-opera-plots – love versus loyalty – and the genius of Giuseppe
Verdi as the world-champion inventor of the right melodies for turning those plots
into white-hot music, you would expect the Verdian repertory to loom large among
the triumphant pages of any major opera company. The sad fact seems to be, however,
that our local company, now nearing its 20th birthday, has yet to mount a completely
satisfactory Verdi production. Some of its failures have, in fact, ranked among
the worst doozers in its history. (Remember the Kabuki-style Macbeth? The
Bruce Beresford Rigoletto?)
The current Aida, a revival of the 2000 production that was, in turn, a rerun of the 1987 staging that had inaugurated the new opera house in Houston (the night before the world premiere there of Nixon in China), is not a doozer. Musically, in fact, it belongs in the upper echelon of second-rate local Verdi. A new conductor, the schoolboyish-looking Dan Ettinger (Israeli, 34), keeps things moving nicely and, considering the predilection of his singers to favor the high end of the dynamic range against Verdi’s own markings, manages at times to create some sense of ensemble. Michèle Crider is the Aida, new to the company and quite obviously in a family way. Maternal matters aside, she is quite a splendid young singer, possessed of a ravishing top that floats across the Nile like the stars in Verdi’s woodwinds and a real heartbreak as the opera’s final wisp of melody merges with the darkness. The Radames, Franco Farina (left over from last year’s wretched Trovatore), delivers his calling card on his first entrance, a “Celeste Aida” with Verdi’s called-for pianissimo annulled by a ringing fortissimo. A much more impressive fortissimo later in the evening, however, is delivered by the Amonasro, Lado Ataneli, on his opening line at the end of Act 2, and it suddenly hits you that this is the first male singing of genuine quality that you’ve heard all evening. He’s a wonderful singer, this Ataneli he was the Nabucco a couple of years ago; the problem is that he outsings the ensembles. Irina Mishura acts out her Amneris as a Theda Bara villainess in some silent (but hardly silent) movie. Vera Calábria’s new staging makes do without some of Pier-Luigi Pizzi’s Egyptian-museum props, which cluttered his original version; a few more could go. The production is in no way handsome. The sliding panels that set off scenes are ugly in themselves and boring in their use; the pillars in Amneris’ boudoir bring on nostalgia for New York subway stations. And then there is the matter of the battling life-size toy elephants and other ludicrous onstage happenings during what is hopefully titled the “Triumphal Scene.”
That scene begins and ends with grand, sweeping choruses and ensembles that pin
you to your seat with the Italianate melodic ecstasy I was talking about back
there. In between comes an expanse of orchestral music – 10 minutes, or so it
seems – that is meant to accompany pantomimes and dances as the Egyptians exult
at their victory over the Ethiopians. Some of it is new; some of it, Verdi’s rehash
of music previously heard (a speeded-up version of “Ritorna, vincitor,” for example);
all of it is inferior to anything else in the opera. Minus one or two repeats,
the current Aida includes this whole sequence, with a bunch of swell acrobats
to help pass the time and to help make the opera into an entertainment package
to compete with any other package now in town bearing the same title. I am ordinarily
disinclined to advocate incomplete performances, least of all in music I otherwise
admire. In this case, however, less would be definitely more.

Photo by Alice Arnold

Steve Reich’s You Are (Variations), the Master Chorale’s gleaming new acquisition unveiled at Disney Hall last weekend under Grant Gershon’s proud direction, starts off on congenial ground. We are immediately thrust among old friends: the Reich signature of pulsating polytonal chords lit with the familiar ping of marimbas and vibes. Music for 18 Musicians began that way in 1976; so did The Desert Music in ’84. The latter piece used a small chorus to intone and entwine brief lines from William Carlos Williams; the new work for small chorus and instruments – a co-commission by the Master Chorale, Lincoln Center and Germany’s Ensemble Modern – incorporates “aphoristic truisms” (Reich’s words) from ancient Hebrew and more recent Wittgenstein, sources Reich has used before. The marvel of the latest work is the newness of its expression, the fresh sounds and messages Reich has found within materials that are already known aspects of his musical language.

The essence of that language is repetition, and the richness of impact to be gained from the infinite variety of that technique. “You are wherever your thoughts are” is the line by a Hasidic mystic that gives the work its title. Like a jewel examined in changing light, the text rises and falls through the instrumental texture, with single words or entire phrases passing in and out of audibility. Like all of Reich’s music, the work must use amplification in live performance as a means, he explains, of controlling the clarity in the percussive textures. In Disney, where amplification problems still loom, there were moments of harshness.

This kind of music, which has grown directly from Reich’s earliest minimalist exercises and flourishes mightily, is now only a part of his legacy. Beside it are his multimedia pieces – The Cave, Three Tales – in which other kinds of lyric writing usurp the attention and in which some fascinating uses of speech patterns become further elements among musical sources. He continues to find new uses for his “classic” minimalist techniques, as You Are (Variations) handsomely suggests. His publisher recently sent along a tape of a new Counterpoint for cello and tape, a worthy shelf-mate for the “Vermont” (flute) and “Manhattan” (clarinet) Counterpoints. He becomes positively flirtatious when the matter of writing an opera comes up in conversation. The final text for this splendid new work for the Master Chorale, it might be worth noting in this regard, is “Say little and do much.”

Piano Spheres and Lead Balloons

At Zipper Auditorium two nights later, Gloria Cheng began the 11th season of Piano Spheres, with the presence – only in spirit this time – of founding mentor and participant Leonard Stein, who left us last June. Some of her program had been Stein’s choice (for himself, although his fingers had been stilled a year before). Seventy rain-soaked minutes on I-10 had cost me the first of Schoenberg’s Opus 19 “Little Piano Pieces”; what I heard elicited from Cheng the elegance, the fantasy, the daring of a young composer breaking through that I doubt Stein could have approached at any time in Piano Spheres’ history. Stein had also pushed for George Benjamin’s Shadowlines, and indeed this British composer needs better attention over here than this set of wispy short pieces suggests. The evening’s strongest work was also short and also Brit: a single section from Harrison Birtwistle’s Harrison’s Clocks, marvelously intricate and witty, an emphatic drumbeat for a composer whose neglect – locally, and in the U.S. on the whole – measured against his considerable strengths is a matter of some shame.

Music by two composers named Stephen Taylor – a set of sound-effect pieces by Stephen Andrew relative to scenic wonders (Antarctica, Tibet, etc.) and something by Stephen James about anger expressed in intervals of seconds and sevenths – were further linked by shared triviality. Stephen Andrew offended with his fondness for fortissimo trills with great handfuls of notes at the top of the keyboard, a process for the inflicting of pain upon large numbers of trapped people that bears criminal investigation.

In Praise Of Popov

But for the irresistible evangelism of Alex Ross, periodically in The New Yorker and virtually day-to-day on his Web site (www.therestisnoise.com), I might have passed to an unquiet grave without hearing a note of the music of Gavriil Popov; now curiosity and satisfaction possess my inmost soul. Popov’s dates are 1904–72, making him an almost exact contemporary of Dmitri Shostakovich; his music made something of a splash last summer as part of Leon Botstein’s Shostakovich Festival at Bard College. There were recordings, apparently rather dim, of three of his seven symphonies on the Olympia label, now defunct. Now there is a new recording of No. 1 on Telarc, not at all dim, with Botstein conducting the London Symphony.

The Popov story reads like that of Shostakovich, but without the happy endings. This First Symphony, commemorating the October Revolution, had won a newspaper prize; the day after its 1935 premiere it was attacked and banned in Pravda as “formalist,” reflecting “the ideology of classes hostile to us.” The ban was eventually lifted, but Popov was scarred by the experience. For the rest of his life he ground out safely non-formalist, party-line music. He had some contact with Shostakovich, but they were not close.

This First Symphony, then, can be taken as the one work encapsulating Popov’s full genius, which is considerable. The work, in three movements, lasts about 50 minutes. The Shostakovich Fourth comes to mind in the music’s massive outreach, but Popov’s control of his material makes for a tighter, stronger organization. David Fanning’s program notes refer to a “manic momentum,” and that is a fair estimate. The shape (“formalism” if you prefer) of the first movement disturbs me somewhat; it seems to come to an end too soon. Perhaps a conductor with a greater command of oratory than the rather all-purpose Leon Botstein can make this work better, although this recording is already an open window to a remarkable “new” masterwork.

Obiter dictum: As promised, I checked out the B-team for the L.A. Opera’s Carmen, a group most notably motivated by the vital, sizzling conducting of Nicola Luisotti – whose arrival in the pit the orchestral musicians loudly cheered. May he soon return, in better company. Catherine Malfitano is the aged, clumsy star, her tattered off-cue voice the ghost of Carmens past. “Je veux danser en votre honneur,” she tells Don José in Act 2, and proceeds to “dance in his honor” by standing stock-still without a twitch. Mario Malagnini is the acceptable B-team José; at least he doesn’t bray.

I promised I’d go, but I didn’t promise I’d stay to the end. I mean . . . gee whiz, folks!

Every opera company needs Carmen as the “C” to complete the “A” (Aida) and the “B” (La Bohème) of the essential repertory; this season our local forces are providing the full complement. Do not mistake that out of hand, however, as the stamp of good health. The current Carmen at the Music Center is the company’s third try, and they haven’t gotten it right yet.

The problems go back to the opera’s early days, to Bizet’s original sizzling opéra comique with its abrasive orchestration and the spoken dialogue between musical numbers that moved the action furiously forward. Bizet died soon after the 1875 premiere, and tampering hands got to work on the score, slowing the action with sung instead of spoken dialogue, diluting the genius of the original with lesser hackwork. This became the “standard” Carmen, so identified in all the press handouts. Everybody knows that Bizet’s original is by far stronger, but the “standard” version has become so ingrained that singers and conductors are too lazy to learn the better score. Francesco Rosi’s marvelous film, with Plácido Domingo and Julia Migenes-Johnson, now on DVD, preserves this original version.

Like its previous attempts in 1992 and 1998, the Los Angeles Opera’s new Carmen is defeated at the start by its espousal of the corrupt “standard” version, further weakened by the nothing-much conducting of Domingo on opening night, by the work of three of the four principal cast members that ranged from negligible to deplorable, and by a production that clogged the visual receptors even as the music offended the ears. (Two casts of principals are being fielded during the 12 performances, and two conductors. I’ll check out the B-team and report, if there’s anything worth reporting. How’s that for heroism beyond the call?)

Milena Kitic is the A-team Carmen, Belgrade-born, currently residing in Pasadena, active in local opera. She sings prettily, but without much in the chest. Worse, for a woman of her slender and attractive build, her stage movements are without slink: a Carmen behaving like a Micaela. That latter part – my nomination for opera’s most unnecessary role even under optimum conditions – was sung by Carmen Giannattasio with the requisite forgettable, pale sweetness. From the yawps and howls of Richard Leech’s Don José there were no surprises: a tenor never more than second-rate-utility at the height of his career, now in decline from even that sad state. Only the larruping Escamillo of the ever-reliable Erwin Schrott produced something like a spark of life.

To its great credit, and our no-less-great edification, the Philharmonic’s current “Silenced Voices” program uncovers a segment in musical history virtually unknown and certainly undervalued: two generations of Central European music, mostly but not entirely by Jewish composers, deemed unacceptable by Nazi artistic standards and thus removed from circulation. Some of it, of course, survived with its composers who were able to emigrate – Korngold, Weill, Zemlinsky; much of it did not, vanishing as its composers perished in Hitler’s gas ovens. Absent this music, we lack a whole strand of 20th-century musical history parallel to the development of atonality and neoclassicism.

One single thread that did survive, miraculously, is the music of Viktor Ullmann, who as a prisoner at Theresienstadt composed almost 20 works, including an opera, and managed to pass the manuscripts on to a librarian at the camp who preserved them and, many years later, made their presence known. An amazed world first heard the one-act satirical opera The Emperor of Atlantis in 1975; it was given here this past week at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple. James Conlon conducted with a small vocal ensemble from Juilliard and the Philharmonic New Music Group; on discs and in two weeks at the Philharmonic, this “Irish kid from Long Island” (his words) has made the rediscovery and restoration of this suppressed concentration-camp repertory a matter of personal priority.

There is more to this music than its creators’ personal stories; both the opera and Ullmann’s Second Symphony, which Conlon conducted with the Philharmonic, are strong and fascinating works that do indeed fill in great stylistic gaps in our awareness of their time. The opera, to a libretto by Peter Kien, treats a fable familiar itself for its time, an allegory involving the personification of Death held at bay, and an Emperor and a Harlequin at odds on the value of Life; into the music there went the expected shreds of Strauss (all Strausses), some Mahler, much Weill, much of the bristle of the young Hindemith. In the symphony, fleshed out by a contemporary editor from notations left by Ullmann on the manuscript of a piano sonata, there is all of the above plus, in a powerful slow movement, a richness of oratory that has the outlines of a Bruckner on a level of eloquence that tragic figure never attained. This is, then, important music. There are Conlon recordings of the two symphonies, on Capriccio; see for yourself.

Cage, Ives, Harrison, Riley . . . somebody in heaven must have had a hand in concocting Jacaranda’s first program of the season (and the second one, too, all-Mozart on November 20, with the 13-Wind Serenade, the Piano-Wind Quintet and the “Dissonance” Quartet). Surely you know this concert series by now: chamber music lovingly planned, handsomely set in Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian (where even the organ is the proper size). This first concert, a rewarding variorum of masterwork and not-quite, drew well; word is around.

Matters began with the endearing trivialities of Cage’s Living Room Music, congenial strokings of household furniture brought onstage for the occasion, some to Gertrude Stein poetry, some not. Later there was Cage’s famous silent piece 4’33” performed by pianist Scott Dunn with majestic solemnity; Dunn also participated – fingers and all this time, and with violinist Sarah Thornblade and cellist Timothy Loo – in Charles Ives’ Trio, with its hilarious jumble of quotations one minute and its apparent inability to get to any kind of point the next. Guitarist Miroslav Tadic and violinist Thornblade collaborated in a set of garrulous Terry Riley pieces whose inability to get to a point was part of their charm. Best of all was Lou Harrison’s hugely insistent, dramatic Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra, its killer solos dispatched by a phenomenal 22-year-old violinist named Joel Pargman – remember that name – with a mostly student ensemble led by Donald Crockett.

There are times when you’re listening to a piece, and you squirm in your seat and can’t wait for it to end. There are times when you sit transfixed and pray that it never ends. On successive nights last week – the Carmen and Lou Harrison’s Concerto – I was able to touch both extremes.

BY A COINCIDENCE of trifling importance, the Los Angeles Opera’s two music directors – Kent Nagano present and James Conlon future – turn up on disc releases this month. By further coincidence, both works are musical turkeys: clumsy, noisy choral works by major composers that add nothing and detract considerably from their creators’ otherwise lustrous reputations. Both, of course, will gladden the hearts of those peculiar fanatics among the world’s galaxy of collectors, the ones who must have everything, who would regard a collection lacking, say, an unfinished deathbed composition of Franz Liszt, however flawed, the way you or I might regard a pebble in a shoe.

In a whole shelf of tomes on the life and works of Beethoven, I find no writing kindly disposed toward the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, yet Nagano’s new Harmonia Mundi recording is actually the fifth of the work to appear since the dawn of the CD era. Worse yet, Franz Liszt’s St. Stanislaus rates no more than a footnote in my three or four biographies of that worthy composer, yet here on Telarc is an hour’s worth of music from this unfinished work from Liszt’s dying years, a performance Conlon put together at last year’s Cincinnati May Festival, an annual event he has shepherded since 1973.

The ardent collector would have us believe, of course, that the less renowned a work’s position in its composer’s pantheon of masterworks, the more exalted its stature as a masterpiece. These two works from, respectively, the dawning and the sunset years in the era of the overstuffed romantic choral escapade – an era illuminated along its way with such flickering lights as Mendelssohn’s Elijah and the Brahms Requiem – hold a certain fascination. Terrible as they are, they serve as paradigms: the Beethoven as the perfect specimen of the bloodless academic counterpoint he so brilliantly surpassed in the fugues of his last string quartets, the Liszt as a blind alley where Wagner-inspired chromatic harmonies seem to strangle themselves in their own complexity.

Beethoven’s 48-minute oratorio tells of Jesus’ betrayal by Judas and the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane; there are important roles for Jesus, Peter and a Seraph, and a chorus of soldiers and disciples gets to whoop things up at the end. But nothing ever moves; arias and recitatives fall into blocky forms, and even the choral movements lack impulse. Everything goes by formula – it’s difficult to realize that this stodgy music was conceived earlier in the same year (1803) that produced the “Eroica.” Plácido Domingo sings the Jesus; his recent success as Wagner’s Parsifal would, you’d think, endow his voice with the intensity to countenance the pathos in this kind of music, but Beethoven gives him little. Nagano and his Berlin Deutsches Symphonie provide a fine resonance; Luba Orgonasova and Andreas Schmidt take the subsidiary roles.

An oratorio on Poland’s Saint Stanislaus, who in 1079 had the sass to confront the tyrannical King Boleslaw and get him to recant his evil ways, occupied the aging Franz Liszt in his last days, until failing eyesight forced him to put the project aside with two of the four scenes completed. Since those scenes already add up to an hour’s music, there was plenty for Conlon, his May Festival Chorus, seven vocal soloists and the Cincinnati Symphony to sink their teeth into for their world premiere last year; this, after all, is the kind of event that brings the Lisztomaniacs, the media and the recording engineers on the run (or would have, in my day).

There is only one problem, and it reveals itself about 30 seconds into the tortured, slithering, aimless chromaticism of the opening orchestral introduction and never shakes itself loose thereafter: This music is dull, as if nothing in the world had ever been dull before. It is dull like a parody of dullness; it is dull as if the Brahms Requiem had turned into a klezmer convention; it is dull as if the AMA had defined a new level of physical pain. In a wretched sequence, chorus passes into aria; aria passes into orchestral fantasy on some obscure Polish hymn, then to another. One excellent soloist is Kristine Jepson, who sang the role of Sister Helen in Opera Pacific’s Dead Man Walking and, therefore, knows her way around lost causes – which do, after all, count as collectibles.

IT IS TIME — long past time, in fact – for me to write about Valentin Silvestrov, one of that remarkable group of Eastern European composers whose cause in the West has been most forcefully undertaken by the noble record producer Manfred Eicher of ECM. Born in Ukraine in 1937, Silvestrov followed a more or less standard evolution – some 12-tone, some Cage, some Shostakovich and Schnittke – toward the unique stylistic mix his music presents as a challenge to latter-day description.

His Requiem for Larissa, released on ECM this past spring and composed in memory of his late wife, explodes out of darkness. Deep-toned percussion (“a black lake,” writes Paul Griffiths in his notes) floods our ears; a horn and the chorus can’t quite get the words out: “Requiem.” The music pounds, then stops, then pounds once again. Of all the settings of the words of the Mass for the Dead, the “Dies Irae” here, in its jagged savagery, strikes the deepest terror. Later a solo mezzo-soprano sings the “Lacrimosa” in a tortured, fearful melody, and the men of the chorus fling it back at her. “Eternal rest” lies far out of reach in these harmonies that pierce the eardrums. Near the end solo, winds and brass hurl fragments of troubled melody over what sounds like an empty vastness, yet this soon melts into a kinder vision, as soft bells, harp and celesta offer the comfort long awaited and a soft wind seems to caress the troubled landscape.

Silvestrov writes strong music that hurtles across many styles. On another ECM disc from a year ago, there’s his Postludium, a massive work for piano (Alexei Lubimov) and orchestra (Dennis Russell Davies, conducting), astonishing in its brutality at times but no less astonishing for its angelic apotheosis at the end. His music comes to us this coming March, when UCLA and ECM join in an extended festival they’re calling “Elective Affinities,” with a number of ECM notables on hand that I’ve written about in awe over the years – the Hilliard Ensemble, Jan Garbarek, Dino Saluzzi and the Keith Jarrett Trio. One event, listed for March 17, has music by Valentin Silvestrov and Arvo Pärt played by the Munich Chamber Orchestra. Both composers will be in attendance, and you should be, too.

ON A RECENT SATURDAY the euphoria downtown was something you could walk
on: a ninth-inning grand-slam home run at Dodger Stadium, a brand-new bundle of
organ pipes down the hill at Disney Hall. With the Dodgers’ joy, and their pipe-dream-come-true (at this writing, at least), I have no problem sharing; from the new toy at Disney, I must – what’s that word in the legalistic lingo? – recuse myself.

Impressive, yes; awesome, yes; one more Frank Gehry visual to do honor to its creator, definitely yes; what I cannot do, with the new organ at Disney or with any other of its kind, is to accept its sound as beautiful. The sound of the pipe organ, any pipe organ, is a noise mechanically created, by extraordinarily complex means, to simulate musical tones. It cannot, at the same time, simulate the human impulse that creates these tones – the impact of breath or finger. It cannot simulate the way a singer or a string player can bend a tone slightly to match another tone nearby. (Not all “human” instruments can do all of this, either, which is why we have ensembles made up of many kinds of instruments.)

And so, organs (pipe, electronic, whatever) are some kind of elaborate fake, and they sound fake. The opening dash to the cadence of Bach’s D-minor Toccata and Fugue, which Todd Wilson played to start the first subscription concert, was a glazed, metallic, tooth-jarring shriek that had nothing to do with any musical sound I could acknowledge. Organs in churches much smaller than this one, of course, have been used by great composers like J.S. Bach to create wonderful musical designs; has anyone actually described the sound of these works as “beautiful,” as the term might apply to a slow movement from a Brandenburg Concerto or an aria from the Mass? The organ works are masterpieces of design, and we hear them that way. They have paved the way for generations of lesser composers, who have perverted Bach’s compositional impulses on perversions of Bach’s instruments to create the contemporary organ repertory. Olivier Messiaen has been more eloquent than most in employing the instrument to convey his long-winded personal messages to the Heavenly Host and all His pals.

Some composers have been tempted to blend the organ into monster orchestral compositions. In the Philharmonic’s first two weeks the programs have put forth two of the best-known horrors along this line: the so-called “Organ” Symphony by Saint-Saëns and Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, along with Strauss’ Festival Prelude, which is my new nominee for the worst music ever written. It’s worth noting that, although both the Saint-Saëns and Zarathustra owe their fame to their bone-rattling C-major organ blasts, in both of them these blasts occur only one or two times during music of a half-hour duration. Most likely, both Saint-Saëns and Strauss were shrewd enough to realize that the discrepancy in tuning between organ and other instruments would have created harmonic chaos if allowed to settle into an audience’s awareness.

I asked the Disney Hall organ builder, Manuel Rosales, how designers deal with this discrepancy, the clash in intonation between the organ and instruments in equal temperament. (The Saint-Saëns, which calls for both organ and piano, sets up a particularly horrendous clash, which nobody bothers to notice because the music is so busy at the time.) He had no real answer: “We just make the organ sound as nice as we can.” The one really satisfactory organ-plus-instruments music on these inaugural concerts was Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Organ and Percussion that was stuck between the Bach and the Saint-Saëns and, in terms of innovative sounds deployed with high imagination, put everything else to shame. Wilson’s stilted performance, however, had the feel of a stranger in a strange land.

PIPE ORGANS IN GREAT cathedrals become part of the architectural psychology; their sound seems to fulfill the interior of the building. Two wheezy ancient organs answering each other across the vast space of San Marco in Venice renew the inspiration that drove Monteverdi and the Gabrielis 400 years ago. High mass at Notre Dame in Paris involves some turgid, nondescript music by a latter-day hack composer, but the place defines the sound and vice versa. At Disney Hall it’s the sound of the orchestra on the stage – Salonen and the Philharmonic performing Berlioz, say – that fulfills the space; the organ comes at you from one place, up high in the hall. I’m not at all sure that we’re going to make the adjustment to include that sound in the fullness the hall provides. Maybe, but don’t take bets.

Pipe organs in concert halls are prestige items. The New York Philharmonic suffered a terrible blow to its ego when its pipe organ had to be ripped out of Avery Fisher Hall during one of its frequent acoustic make-overs. (That organ, by the way, currently resides at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove.) In the concert hall it is not totally useless, of course; at Sunday’s Master Chorale concert, which consisted entirely of choral music plus organ, the sound supporting the chorus in the D-major Mass of Dvorák was lush and lovely; the trumpeting dissonances in and around James MacMillan’s Magnificat helped redeem the churchly dullness of the interminable vocal stuff. But at the Philharmonic pre-concert event, the orchestra’s CEO Deborah Borda had rattled off, as benefits bestowed by the possession of the new organ, the gladsome tidings that the orchestra would now be able to schedule the Poulenc Organ Concerto and Franz Liszt’s Battle of the Huns, and it struck me that those works of arguable merit may have been acquired at rather a high price.

Meanwhile, back at the opera . . . I had promised you, and myself, to look in on the Los Angeles Opera’s Ariadne auf Naxos one more time as Laura Claycomb took on the role of Zerbinetta for the last two performances. This, in a word, was stupendous: more than a flawless vocal performance, a creation of body and voice and spirit so grand in conception as to spread its magic to those around her. Everything worked; the creature of light and air scratched together by Strauss and von Hofmannsthal out of random scraps became a whole new and vital gear in the turning of the drama. Claycomb, who has sung songs of Salonen at Ojai and Bellini’s Juliet at the Music Center, became here not just a late-in-the-run replacement but a great and original creative artist. Cherish her.

Inevitably, but at glacial pace, the art of Robert Wilson moves westward. In European theater, his work has exerted a volcanic influence over the past three decades. In New York, or at least in Brooklyn, he has maintained a stronghold for even longer. In Los Angeles, however, he has been on our conscience, but not on our stages, since the city’s failure – of funding, but also of vision – to import the gargantuan, multinational, multimedia CIVIL warS that he concocted for the 1984 Olympics. Attempts to restore to circulation his Einstein on the Beach, his signature work and in some ways his greatest, have also sputtered; about the 1998 Monsters of Grace, a later collaboration with Philip Glass, his one original work seen here so far, the less said the better.

But last season’s Madama Butterfly at the L.A. Opera, not a new production but a carefully prepared revival, was pure Wilson: the exquisitely intricate sense of stage movement, the lighting that swept the eye toward magical far horizons, and, most remarkable, the way the characters onstage seemed to absorb light and color until it became their defining dimension. And if you make the pilgrimage to San Francisco’s Geary Theater – where Wilson’s The Black Rider, the first completely original work of his to play these shores, will be on the boards for another week – the first thing you will notice is that same intensity, as though the confraternity of dyestuff and paint and lighting has saturated everything and made the essence of color into a dimension of itself.

The fable of The Black Rider partakes deeply of the essence of theater: good versus evil, the power of make-believe to enlist the participation of all the senses. This particular permutation derives from a German folktale, but the aura is universal. Wilhelm, the simple-minded schnook, needs to win the huntsman’s contest to earn the hand of Katie; on his own, however, he can’t even hit a barn door. Enter the Devil, who offers a handful of Magic Bullets, but doesn’t let on that the last bullet belongs to him. Needless to say, that last bullet becomes the bearer of mischief; Katie falls, and Wilhelm ends up in the loony bin. Carl Maria von Weber took the same story into Der Freischütz but gave it a happy ending. The only treatment of the tale that comes close to the Wilson version is Achim Freyer’s staging of the Weber with the Stuttgart Opera, which, to our great good fortune, has just turned up on DVD.

Wilson’s Black Rider dates from 1990, first performed in German at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater; when it came to the Brooklyn Academy for a 10-day run in 1993, it was already a legend. With an insight born of genius, Wilson gathered to the making of the work the high/low art of two of his time’s most eloquent spokesmen for inner disturbance, the drug-sozzled writer William S. Burroughs and the abrasive balladeer Tom Waits. As with Einstein, the resultant work is so seamless that it seems to stem from a single impulse, a single genius. The English version had its premiere at London’s Barbican last May, and was brought to San Francisco by that city’s admirable American Conservatory Theater. It travels now to lucky Sydney.

The songs, a marvelous stew of Brecht, Weill and Waits himself, cackled forth by an enchanted cast led by Marianne Faithfull (as, of course, the Devil) and the rubber-legged dancer Matt McGrath (recently of Hedwig and the Angry Inch), seem to mirror the stage pictures, with their grotesque props like children’s drawings gone askew. Now and then there’s an evocation: a moment from some long-forgotten silent film, some children’s cutouts you remember from kindergarten. Memories go fleeting by, and you don’t quite grasp them, because some of the theater is happening within your own head. In the pit, a band calling itself the Magic Bullets grinds out new music full of Kurt Weill’s sourness; a virtuoso on the musical saw sets your teeth on edge.

The vital element of Wilson’s art is his amazing power of concentration, of drawing a dramatic detail out of a situation and bearing down on its implications at whatever length. That, I think, is the crux of Einstein, and it works here as well. Not for him the diversionary tactics of the trash mongers I wrote about not long ago, whose notion of modern theater is to stage Wagner’s Ring in an office-building basement. He starts with reality, and goes on from there. Given the breadth of his imagination, he can go far.

Rounding out my Bay Area weekend, there was Kent Nagano’s Berkeley Symphony at UC’s Zellerbach Hall, with the American premiere of the Violin Concerto by Unsuk Chin, a work preceded by considerable fame – including the winning of the $200,000 Grawemeyer Award at the University of Louisville, no small potatoes – and worth every blast. Born in Korea but mostly educated in Berlin, Chin has been moving forward at a fair clip, with Nagano one of her strong proponents. Her tricky chamber piece Acrostic Wordplay turned up on a Green Umbrella program a couple of years ago; her opera on Alice in Wonderland is slated for the L.A. Opera’s 2005-06 season (conducted by guess who), and there was a short excerpt from that work, along with a big electronic work, at last summer’s Ojai Festival.

The Violin Concerto, which Vivianne Hagner performed at Berkeley, is stronger than anything of Chin’s I have yet heard, a phenomenally tense, marvelously scored piece lasting about half an hour. Much is made of the violin intoning a rhapsodic melodic line over a percussive throbbing. Much, too, is made of killer virtuoso stuff. Chin writes with what seems to me a natural gift for the concerto, for making solo instruments say something along with an orchestra. She has composed concertos for piano and for percussion, which I am eager to hear. I am eager, in fact, to hear anything that proclaims the arrival of an important composer with serious, original ways of finding new things to say within the old shapes. These days, that’s rare.

Photo by Viaamse Opera, Annemie Augustijns

Haydn at the Bowl on one balmy night, Mozart at the Music Center on another: The segue between seasons here is less a meteorological matter than sartorial, and the transition this time has been unusually smooth.

Idomeneo comes laden with genius, and with problems. The title role sits uneasily in the repertory; it is the one Mozartian lead that can attract a supertenor without collapsing under his tonsils. Pavarotti and Domingo have both sung and recorded it; the last Idomeneo here – in a cutesy Maurice Sendak production in 1990 about which the less said the better – was the Wagnerian Siegfried Jerusalem. Domingo’s Idomeneo may be ready to abandon his throne, however, if last week’s performance on the Los Angeles Opera’s opening night is any judge. The heroic ring had severely faded, and so had the lovely lyricism. Domingo seems to have recognized this, since some 20 minutes of the opera, most of it the noble resignation as the deposed ruler relinquishes his realm to his son, had been cut. It’s a wise opera boss who knows his own score.

The opera represents Mozart’s final leap out of provincial captivity before moving on to his conquest of Viennese musical society. This curious hybrid represents the melding of his sublime genius for creating operatic human beings in full harmonic clothing and setting them to breathe within the archaic dramatic framework that enlists the aid of gods to resolve human dilemmas and expresses manly bravery in the soprano, coloratura vocal registers. These exasperating mechanisms had creaked to their demise in Handel’s time a generation before: above all the da capo (or cabbage twice-chewing) aria complete with final cadenza that occasions its hero or heroine to tread and then retread familiar ground in the cause of classical symmetry. As with Handel, we wait long hours for two characters to actually sing to one another instead of out to the audience or upward to the favoring zephyrs.

But how they sing! There is a phrase in the cadences of poor, put-upon Princess Ilia’s song to the breezes that starts the last act, and when that phrase floats in upon you, you just have to pick up the needle and play it again and again. It’s at times like this that you draw your comfort by knowing that Mozart will, in due time, come around to repeating that phrase; he, too, knew a good tune and a melting harmony when he heard them. Later in that act the Prince Idamante and the Princess Ilia finally get around to recognizing that they’re in love and have been for the last three or so hours, and so they sit on the ground – at least in Vera Calábria’s tidy staging – and sing about it, and that too is wonderful. Ten years from then, when Papa Geno and his Mama get together in a later opera and start making babies, perhaps Mozart remembered the delight that earlier duet had created.

Idomeneo is nevertheless hard to love. Nobody will ever satisfactorily explain the presence of the character known as Elettra, who is actually the same Electra who goes bonkers (and, presumably, dies of terminal ecstasy) at the end of the Richard Strauss opera – or the Sophocles drama, if you prefer – but turns up here to get in everybody’s way to no purpose, bestriding the stage, hurling forth brainless coloratura to establish herself as forerunner of the Queen of the Night To Come. The opera abounds in that kind of late-baroque foofaraw; the wonder is that Mozart and his librettist could light a path through it all, create a drama in which the dramatic strengths are so strong and so harrowingly beautiful that the moments of surrender to past usage become close to bearable. I am not ready to swallow whole the note I often come across, i.e., that “Idomeneo is the richest and most original of all the Mozart operas . . .” (as in the recent booklet with EMI’s Ian Bostridge recording). As a case study in survival, however, in preserving the glow of its genius through the encrustations of period usage, the work is some sort of miracle.

The failure of firmness and eloquence in the name role is, of course, a drawback, but the strengths of Idomeneo are various, and are on the whole nicely represented here in the elegant orchestral ensemble under Kent Nagano and the cumulative power of William Vendice’s chorus. Verónica Villarroel dines well on Elettra’s madness, if at times at the expense of Mozart’s melodic shapes, but I cannot deny her the evening’s biggest cheers, which she pulled down on opening night. More to my – and, I think, Mozart’s – taste were the beautifully matched Idamante and Ilia of Kate Aldrich and Adriana Damato, whose eventual coming together in that aforementioned duet is one of the memories I gladly took home on opening night.

Michael Vale’s set, from the Flanders Opera, is adequate in the best sense, a backdrop of several panels that catches Tina MacHugh’s lighting onto abstract shapes and opens to show the menacing God Neptune at climactic moments and a raked performing area down front: nothing more, nothing more needed. Calábria, an old Idomeneo hand (she worked on several productions with the legendary Jean-Pierre Ponnelle), moves the action simply and with a welcome lack of pretense. If this oversized almost-masterwork is going to reveal its genius and glide past its problem patches, let it be thus.

At the Bowl the season lumbers on. At the moment I ponder: Do I really want to sit through a symphony drawn from Lord of the Rings on those giant screens, or spend evenings with reality and my new DVD at home? Basically the video at the Bowl has been a farce and a fiasco. The use the video setup should be put to – information, names of songs, well-coordinated integration with players – would mount to hopeless expense in equipment and rehearsal time. Besides, who would want it? Who comes to the Bowl for that much education about the onstage goings-on? It would be interesting to learn how much of this was foreseen and discussed before those screens went up.

My favorite moment at the Bowl came two weeks ago when Nicholas McGegan was conducting Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony. You know the place, don’t you – the Big Bang in the slow movement that gives the piece its name? Well, McGegan did the Bang, and it echoed off the nearby buildings as the Big Bangs have been doing all summer . . . And for all I know it may be echoing still.

Nirvana looms for the organic crowd – not the veggies-and-sprouts folks this time, but the seekers of ecstasy in the sounds of the “world’s most perfect” (and, thus, least musical) instrument, the devotees of Diggle and Thistlethwaite. This is the month when the wraps come off the organ at Disney Hall, that interesting mass of architectural every-which-way (most accurately described as a bag of McDonald’s fries newly dropped) and sight-joins-sound.

Organ fanciers are a strange lot. They do, indeed, put up with an instrument inherently out of tune with anything else in the concert spectrum; it shares this incompatibility with the piano, but the two are also incompatible with each other. Noise and more noise: That seems to be their ideal. A British record label, Priory, runs around the Isles recording great, clattery instruments in vast, echoey cathedrals, and they promote these as “The Thunderer” and “The Super-Thunderer,” with a ghastly repertory by obscure churchly souls sporting such names as Roland Diggle and N (no period, please) Thistlethwaite, last week’s Yorkshire pudding set to music. The only serious music for the instrument was created for an ambiance that has nothing to do with large concert halls or vast cathedrals, which probably explains why Frederick Swann’s inaugural program at Disney lists only one piece by Bach – the F-major Toccata, with its marvelous showoff cascades of pedal work – adrift among the kind of romantic trash that sustains the contemporary organ repertory.

Grand organs look wonderful enthroned in concert halls; where else would you put them, in fact? (There is, however, a splendid one in the grand hall of Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia. I remember hearing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion there.) Boston’s Symphony Hall glows from the majesty of its organ pipes; so does Vienna’s Musikverein. Frank Gehry’s Disney organ captures and condenses the visual wit of the building it adorns. From what I’ve heard of the instrument so far, organ builder Manuel Rosales’ creation captures the sound of the hall no less dramatically.

But to what use? A large organ in a concert hall can serve the magnificence of the Bach legacy for an audience of the size this music deserves and, so long as attendance isn’t made compulsory, serve as well the funereal maunderings of the French romantics Franck, Widor and their coterie. I can think of maybe five pieces in the repertory that benefit from a real pipe organ as opposed to an electric jobbie, and we’re getting a fair sampling this season. Strauss’ Zarathustra and the Saint-Saëns Third Symphony both contain crowd-rousing C-major organ blasts – one each; is that worth the cost of a real pipe organ? Aside from the sensation of the brief but awaited episodes with the pipe organ blowing its blooie-blooie, both works eventually come up against the clash between that instrument’s tuning and the sounds of the orchestral woodwinds. So does Copland’s 1925 Organ Symphony, which will be a valuable revival even so. (Note, however, that Copland later removed the organ part and re-scored the work as his First Symphony.) The one work that really makes it important that the hall possess a real organ comes with the Philharmonic’s first-ever performance of Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Organ With Percussion, listed for the first subscription weekend, October 2-3.

You might have known that Harrison, with his marvelously eclectic ear for worldwide tuning systems, would cut through the nonsense of attempting to blend the organ’s immovable Pythagorean overtones – “hopelessly tonal,” he called it – into symphonic tunings (as do Strauss and Saint-Saëns). Percussion tuning forms the ideal mating, and this far-seeing work may, indeed, be the world’s first successful attempt to bring the organ into the orchestral realm. It is also, by the way, one of the Philharmonic’s all-too-rare attempts to bring the rich and far-flung imagination of this wise and lovable composer within earshot of local audiences. If this signifies an eventual discovery of the California musical climate by our globe-trotting conductor, so much the better.

Fears that the Philharmonic’s scheduling might lapse into the ordinary after last season’s sensational house party have proved groundless. The mix of the standard and the not-so is, if anything, even more imaginatively shaped in the upcoming season. The what-more-Beethoven factor, for example, is balanced against the delight of having Mitsuko Uchida on hand for all five piano concertos. The Berlioz Fantastique returns uncluttered after last year’s debacle, and the coupling with Salonen’s Mania is, to say the least, cute. Salonen and the Philharmonic performing Berlioz in Disney Hall, in case you haven’t noticed, is the world’s champion sound parlay, bar none.

About the overall sense of the so-called Tristan Project – three acts presented separately, over three nights once repeated, in a Bill Viola visual context and surrounded by other music – I must reserve judgment, but the joining of one of the acts of Wagner’s drama with music from Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de Loin (which I heard and marveled at at Santa Fe) is pure programmatic magic. Considering the length, difficulty and fame of Schönberg’s Gurrelieder, I am baffled to see it listed for a single performance. Chalk it up as just another of those unanswered questions.

The five “Green Umbrella” programs are as distinguished a new-music offering as I know of from any major American orchestra, the more so since four of the programs involve Philharmonic members themselves. The variety is astounding, from the “classic” Stockhausen, Berio and Reich to a new commissioning series to honor the memory of the much-missed Philharmonic education director Sue Knussen, to an evening with the phenomenal Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing her husband Peter’s songs, to new music by Salonen himself. The premises are being put to good use; the fun and games continue.