So I've Heard

The best thing about this job – one of the best things, anyhow – is the chance it affords me to write about Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, as often as I like. I got to write about it last spring when the L.A. Opera put on its so-so production. Now a new recording has landed on my desk. Actually, I’ve never needed an excuse; Figaro is always somewhere on my mind. It not only contains some of the most beautiful music I know, it is also the most convincing demonstration of the way music can move the personages within a drama and, therefore, move the personages witnessing that drama – in a theater, at home in front of a video screen or even just a couple of speakers.

If I can prove this at all, the best way would be from one of the ensembles, when Mozart allows two or more characters to sing what’s on their minds simultaneously, with the music setting them apart – the power of music, in other words, to conquer time. Mozart’s own favorite ensemble in Figaro, or so he wrote somewhere, is the sextet in Act 3. The old harridan Marcellina, who has been trying to get Figaro to marry her, has now discovered that he is actually her illegitimate son; this also thwarts the designs of the Count, who has been trying to get
into the panties of Figaro’s intended bride, Susanna. Mother
and son are now reunited in a series of gooey, saccharine lovey-dovey phrases that show off Mozart’s marvelous mastery of musical parody.

In walks Susanna, who’s not yet in on developments; all she knows is that her darling Figaro is standing there cuddling in the arms of that dreadful Marcellina, and so, naturally, she throws a snit. What Mozart has been delivering to us as all sweetness and light, F major followed by C major, brightness and cheer, is nudged in two quick measures into an ill-tempered minor key. The harmony loses its direction utterly and modulates in sheer desperation, climaxing as Susanna hands Figaro a resounding slap on the ear. Finally Figaro gets in his explanation, joined by the rest of the company, and serenity – dramatic and harmonic – is restored.

But not quite. Perhaps to balance the fact that Susanna has come late into the ensemble, she is now allotted new music of her own: a haunting, serene, flowing tune made up of the most innocent phrases that expand into a perfect arch of melody, a kind of benediction on the joyous resolution of the day’s latest (but not last) crisis. I could argue for this moment as the most beautiful in the entire opera; perhaps Mozart felt that way, too. In any case, it is the kind of flourish that he alone could command, that last little light shone on his characters that lifts them out of artifice and onto a more accessible level where we can share their emotions, even their breath.

The first Figaro was a haphazard affair on 17 78-rpm discs recorded over two seasons (1935-36), with cast changes, at Britain’s Glyndebourne Festival and issued without recitatives. It wasn’t until 1952, well into the LP era, that a company risked an integral recording. (Trivia note: That was the album used by Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption.) In its final issue in 2001, the Schwann catalog listed 15 versions, and I’ve lost count since. On my desert-island shelf sits London/Decca’s Vienna State Opera performance conducted by Erich Kleiber (father of Carlos), with Lisa della Casa’s Countess and Cesare Siepi’s Figaro, a performance of such deep eloquence that I never expected to contemplate moving it aside.

But now there is Harmonia Mundi’s performance conducted by René Jacobs, and with it comes virtually a whole new way of listening to the sound of Mozart. The Belgian-born Jacobs, 58, has a distinguished dual career as countertenor and conductor, favoring mostly a baroque and classical repertory, with some marvelous Monteverdi and Handel operas to his credit. His ensemble is the Concerto Köln, playing on instruments of Mozart’s time and, more to the point, playing with a clarity of impact that Jacobs believes – and goes to some length to elucidate in excellent notes – was regarded by Mozart as integral

to the dramatic integrity of this music. You sense this immediately, and it is thrilling, as the small string section comes crashing down on the first fortissimo of the overture. Go back from here to the warm syrup of the Vienna Philharmonic on this same
passage; that, too, is beautiful, but suddenly it has become
rather tame.

The new cast is imbued with this power, this sense of danger. Figaro (Lorenzo Regazzo) measures the space for his and Susanna’s bed, and his lips almost smack at thoughts of that space in the future. Simon Keenlyside’s Count hurls imprecations at his dithering Countess like a fanfare of trombones; she – Véronique Gens – draws tears with every troubled response.

The rest – Patrizia Ciofi’s Susanna, Angelika Kirchschlager’s Cherubino all a-twinkle – couldn’t be better; together with the marvelously spirited leadership, they turn the venture into a new kind of intensely human chamber music writ large.

Harry Bicket, who was in town to lead only one (why?) of last week’s Hollywood Bowl concerts, is also of the current generation of Europeans who speak the early-music languages particularly well; his 2001 Handel Giulio Cesare with the L.A. Opera is fondly remembered. At the Bowl he gave a nicely balanced reading of the last of Haydn’s symphonies, with the Philharmonic forces properly reduced and loving attention paid to the miraculous flights of harmony in the slow movement. Once again, however, as so often this summer, the intrusive echoes in much of the Bowl’s seating area rendered Haydn’s dramatic scoring ludicrous. This is not a minor problem, and will require some serious construction to correct.

The rest of Bicket’s program consisted of interesting trash. First there was a Salieri overture, an early piece from long before he and Mozart locked horns. After intermission there was an extended collection of clichés and rip-offs in the manner of, say, a 14-year-old Felix Mendelssohn, a parody of a piece of early romantic fluff afflicted by an inability to bring itself to an ending. The music was no better for the fact that it actually was composed by the aforementioned Mendelssohn: a Double Concerto for Violin and Piano, grossly protracted, well enough played (by Yura Lee and Shai Wosner). The Salieri overture that Mr. Bicket conducted, by the way, was to an opera called The Stolen Bucket. There’s probably a joke in there somewhere, but it hardly seems worth the effort.

Leonard Bernstein’s Mass dates from the fade-out of his years as an important composer. After 1971 there would be the pathetic operatic venture A Quiet Place, the failed Broadway project 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and its various spinoffs, and several inconsequential concert works. The music of Mass was little better than any of these, but the circumstances that surrounded it (as an inaugural piece for Washington’s Kennedy Center, composed at Jacqueline Kennedy’s personal request) and the nature of the collaboration (on a first-name basis with the Almighty Himself) have served to hold its place. At the Hollywood Bowl last Thursday the case for Mass – that’s the title, by the way, no “The” – was eloquently set forth and well attended and cheered; whatever the reason, the work lives on. A new recording, led by Kent Nagano, is due out on Harmonia Mundi in October, with the rather curious choice of an operatic tenor, Jerry Hadley, as the Celebrant. (Was Pavarotti not to be had?) At the Bowl the robust eloquence of Jubilant Sykes was the spellbinding alternative.

Well I remember hot, sticky Washington nights in September 1971. The papers reported that audiences – Supreme Court justices, Hubert Humphrey, Bernstein himself, but not, of course, the Nixons – wept copiously at the messages of brotherhood and courage set forth in all this terribly earnest, appallingly contrived balderdash. Never mind that the best of it turned out to be blatant reruns of better, briefer, happier Bernstein bits – the sardonic “America” number from West Side Story, for one, hardly a patriotic, liturgical or architectural tribute. Then, as now, the manipulation stuff was masterful; there is no power on Earth to resist the throat-grab as a small boy (Eugene Olea this time) with sublimely pure soprano tones comes onto a chaos-strewn stage and sings of “secret songs to God.”

This is, as you surely must know, a vast theater piece, conceived as a trope around the Roman Mass but turned ecumenical by musical and dance visitations from dozens of other cultures (including, of course, Lenny’s old pal Adonai, whom he had once beguiled with warm chicken soup in a piece called Kaddish). Alvin Ailey had done the original choreography; at the Bowl, Kay Cole maintained the plan, which involves onstage hordes of casually dressed youngsters throwing their arms around and generally behaving the way show-biz professionals imagine show-biz kids act (something they learn from road-show companies of Bye Bye Birdie). Brass bands come out and tootle; a rock band plays the cleanest rock this side of Lawrence Welk; and all the while a text is being run through (Lenny plus God plus more words provided by Godspell‘s Stephen Schwartz, newly revised), full of 1971 hang-ups: a handbook of radical chic, man, rewritten by the editors of My Weekly Reader.

There are purple moments in Mass, and they uphold every glowing report about the unique, daring genius who set them forth. The tragedy lies in the way they crumble. From lack of interest or from the inability to sustain the arch of a grandiose thought, one great moment after another in Bernstein’s “serious” music simply collapses, as if someone has flicked the switch on life-support. Something like this happens about midway through Mass. The Celebrant himself suffers a momentary crisis of faith, and launches into a recitation that begins to take the form of a mad scene in some as-yet-unwritten bel-canto opera.

But there was music in those Donizetti mad scenes; in the Bernstein version, there is barrenness, a sudden, expressive vacuum in which a stageful of excellent performers under Marin Alsop – the Philharmonic, the Pacific Chorale, the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, marching bands, dancers, singers and dancers, all tidily arranged by director Gordon Hunt to turn the Bowl stage into something resembling a very classy bank lobby – have been completely abandoned by the creative force they were there to serve. I actually felt a chill from this sudden absence, and it occurred to me that I had felt that same chill on a hot, miasmic Washington evening in 1971, faced with the same sad masterwork. A few minutes later some new Bernstein ideas clicked in, the little boy came out and sang his solo, and the music sped to its finish.

But that was the sad story of Bernstein’s aspirations as a “serious” composer; the higher the aim, the more abject the result. The great works – the shows above all – cavort and scamper and, once in a while, even thrill; they whiz from one purple patch to the next, and we come out of the theater having willingly sacrificed two hours of our own breathing. This is the music that will last as long as people care about theater. Now, when “classical” or “serious” or whatever-you-want-to-call-it music faces extinction, bad music like this clumsy, unworkable Bernstein repertory only adds further density to the gathering cloudbank. There’s a Bernstein newsletter called Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, named after one of the lesser pieces, like naming a Beethoven newsletter King Stefan. It perpetuates news of performances of the big, dead concert works, the very ones that do the reputation the most damage, an elaborate, sad study in the art of kicking a dead horse.

In the best film scores, hearing the music can serve to re-create the scene itself: the look of it, and what it did the first time we saw it. Leonard Bernstein knew this, and it’s sad that he didn’t give more time to the art; his On the Waterfront music simply throbs with Jersey grayness and Brando, and that was his one work in the genre. Elmer Bernstein (no relation; they agreed early on, Elmer told me, that he would be “Steen” and Lenny “Stein”) gave his life to that genre, happily, until its end last week. I love the versatility: the ease in the way he brought jazz into bigtime films without ruining it (e.g., the way he used Chico Hamilton’s Quintet in Sweet Smell of Success), the way he could do Western skies (in The Magnificent Seven) without making it inevitable that John Wayne would have to come riding around the next bend, and, above all, the deep, rich humanity of the father and those kids in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Mockingbird has to be everybody’s favorite, but I have another couple. One is a tiny moment in Sweet Smell, a tender parting near the end, with a solo clarinet picking up the mood for just a few seconds. Elmer was delighted when I told him how much I valued that moment, because he did, too. The other is the score he did for the designer Charles Eames for a short film all done with old-fashioned toy trains running through a toy landscape; it’s on a DVD collection of Eames short subjects, a lovely disc. It was the first music of Elmer Bernstein I ever heard, at a film festival in 1954, and I was sure they had gotten the name wrong. They hadn’t.

The film scores of Nino Rota constitute a body of lyric excellence that carries forward the dramatic vernacular of his Italian forebears into the medium of his own time. I say this, of course, with some trepidation; I have only examined one of his 12 operas, although I am currently completely under its spell thanks to the performance I experienced last week in Santa Barbara. But I hold a special place for the films he has helped to create – the Fellini collaborations like Amarcord and 8¹/2 in which the music does, indeed, forge a texture that puts me in mind of the fully musical works of composers a century and more ago, and the huge Verdian melodramas like Visconti’s The Leopard (finally out on DVD) and Coppola’s Godfather epics, which transcend not only their cinematic medium but even their language.

At Santa Barbara the students of the Music Academy of the West produced an actual Nino Rota opera, his 1955 setting of that grand old farce-comedy The Italian Straw Hat, which lingers for most of us in the treasurable 1927 silent film produced by René Clair. The film is still around on VHS, or was the last time I looked; unfortunately, it comes with an endless, obtrusive honky-tonk piano track that you just have to turn off. Rota’s music also goes like the wind, but in a superior direction: a nonstop pastiche of comedic giggle, Offenbach stirred into Rossini and some grand sourness from Rota himself. (Remember the clowns’ dances in 8¹/2?) The Santa Barbara production was similarly airborne. Frank Corsaro’s direction set wings to everything; a 16-member cast handled the pitter-pattering Italian text (or seemed to, to these alien ears) to the manner born; even Randall Behr, distantly remembered – if at all – for his leaden baton at the Los Angeles Opera, managed a performance full of grace, wit and authentic accent. I would not miss these once-a-year productions at the Music Academy, if only to deliver a big, loving hug to Marilyn Horne, the school’s current director, and tell her how right she is to be proud of what her school, with its superior faculty, has accomplished.

Nino Rota’s music hung light in the summer air; so, two nights later, did Dvorák’s, at the Hollywood Bowl. If you question the connection, try this: The sad trumpet tune for the waif Gelsomina in Fellini’s La Strada is an exact haircut off the slow movement of Dvorák’s String Serenade, Opus 22. (You see what happens to people’s minds on hot summer days?) My readings in Sir Donald Tovey, as I have noted in this space more than once, guide me through the music of Antonin Dvorák, through the particular and personal dimensions of his grandeur, “the sublimity which is utterly independent of the size and range of an artist’s subject.” These words apply, of course, to Rota’s music as well; his Italian Straw Hat is a different kind of excellent Italian operatic comedy from Mozart’s Figaro or Verdi’s Falstaff, and its sublimity is of a different dimension. But it exists.

At the Bowl, Yakov Kreizberg led the Philharmonic in the Dvorák G-major Symphony (No. 8 by current listings, although Tovey knew it as No. 4). Actually, Tovey slighted this work in the original collections of his 1939 Essays in Musical Analysis; the huge new collection, The Classics of Music, which came out in 2001, effects a reconciliation. Sir Donald’s working adjective for the symphony is “naughty.” He is troubled that the first movement’s main theme reminds of the old English music-hall number “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo,” but he was wrong. The clearer resemblance is to our own “Mairzy Doats,” which the saintly Antonin probably picked up, if proleptically, on his American visit.

That, however, is neither here nor there. The crowd at the Bowl last Tuesday was of above-average size, as it should have been. Kreizberg, who has been well-received here before – especially in a lively reading of the Shostakovich Ninth in 2000 – delivered an eloquent performance of the G-major Symphony, beautifully balanced and, in the slow movement, quite genuinely moving. On this all-Dvorák program the Cello Concerto was the opening work, in a technically capable but tame rendition by the young German cellist Alban Gerhardt. Dvorák’s orchestral language in both works called for a profusion of short, sharp chords, and from a box seat halfway back on the right side
these were accompanied at many instances by a series of short, sharp echoes.

The New York Times‘ obituary notice on David Raksin’s passing included Stephen Sondheim’s claim that Raksin’s main theme for Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful is “one of the best themes ever written in films.” Raksin was a pioneer, one of the first Americans to stake a claim as Hollywood’s doors were opening mostly to the European crowd. His credentials were in order; perhaps it took some harmony lessons with Arnold Schoenberg to undertake the chromatic twists in “Laura,” his signature tune. Earlier today I fished out Raksin’s old RCA recording of the Bad and the Beautiful Suite to check Sondheim’s claim. True enough; as surging, upwardly moving, symphonic, American-style movie scores go – the genre of film music that Raksin inhabited in his day – this is spectacularly good music. Hearing it brought me back in memory to watching that superheated Hollywood romance in Pauline Kael’s movie theater on Telegraph Avenue half a century ago, plus or minus. Just as music, therefore, it did what soundtrack recordings are supposed to do; I wonder how many of them do that nowadays.

Carlos Kleiber’s recent passing left no noticeable tremors on the musical landscape. He had suffered, the obituary notices read, from a “long-term illness,” but the world had suffered from his even longer-term absence; his last performances of any consequence were in 1994, although there were scattered appearances (and scattered cancellations as well) in ensuing years. I saw him once, in September 1990, conducting Der Rosenkavalier at the Met in his last American engagement.

Even so, I have always spent a lot of time with Kleiber, and have stepped up the pace in the last few weeks. My laserdisc treasures include Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms symphonies, a Johann Strauss “New Year’s Concert” with the Vienna Philharmonic in its gold-encrusted Musikvereinsaal, two versions of Der Rosenkavalier and one of Die Fledermaus. Some of these have also appeared on DVD, and all of them should. I also cherish an Otello from La Scala on videotape, many times dubbed but with the sound still clear.

A performance of Mozart’s “Linz” Symphony from Vienna is a particular prize. What passes between Kleiber and the orchestra is not so much a matter of master and commander – a Lenny or a Herbie handing down the tablets from On High. It is more a matter of sharing, of a communion among players and conductor with an audience invited to look on. Perhaps other matters have passed between Kleiber and the players beforehand – his rehearsals were famously inaccessible – but what I see in these performances, and love to watch time and again, is this extraordinary oneness of the musicality and the seeming lack of self-serving personal furor in the process of making it happen. There are times when he sets his baton at rest and simply lets his gentle smile do the job.

The furor is there, all right. Through the blurred images on my precious tapes of the La Scala Otello there is a musical storm seething through the house that could send anyone running for cover – with an occasional fleeting view of Kleiber himself, his young (40) face lit with a beatific smile, mouthing the words of the “fuoco di gioia” chorus as a privileged participant. On a bargain-priced Deutsche Grammophon compact disc there is a Beethoven Fifth Symphony from Vienna that will knock your socks off. No matter how many times that surge to the end of the first movement has picked you up by the scruff of the neck and shaken you helpless, this one will do it again, with the electricity turned up to 11. There is a Schubert “Unfinished,” also on DG, whose celestial dying out will leave you shorn of access to words.

Seldom heard, even more rarely seen, Kleiber among us was some kind of catalytic force. His performance repertory was small, fatally so for anyone attempting to build a “normal” conducting career in this or the past century. That was obviously not his purpose; his limited range of public activity, and the quality of his performance values, stand as a touchstone, a reminder of times when a sublime performance of the Beethoven Fifth could make people stop and think about the music’s greatness and how to get it into the bloodstream.

Nowadays, with anywhere up to 100 Beethoven Fifths competing for your dollar at the local megastore – and with the classical department often moved over behind pop so that you have to leave your brain outside anyhow – you have to ask whether Kleiber died for the cause, and whether the cause soon will die with him. In his time he was a small but clear beacon light; the job now is to keep it aglow.

My words for Florencia en el Amazonas, the opera by Daniel Catan that the Los Angeles Opera sprang on its supporters in October 1997, were not particularly kind: “one more threadbare attempt to rekindle the operatic manner of Puccini and his lesser followers,” etc. Time has been kinder, either to Mr. Catan’s opera, to my wavering pen, or possibly to both; a semistaged cut-down version of Florencia, up at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater a few nights ago, turned out not bad at all – rather more than that, in fact.

Florencia, drawn from an episode in the writings of Gabriel García Márquez, belongs to the well-populated aging-diva-and-her-memories genre, set on an Amazonian riverboat. It suffers, as do all memoir-operas of my acquaintance, from a tendency to devolve into rather long arias. Furthermore, like most operas of the breed, there needs to be a second, younger singer with a second set of memories – or, at least, prospects – and this, in turn, leads to other long arias. Florencia falls into both traps, but does so rather prettily; at the Ford there was the further decided advantage of the excellent soprano Shana Blake Hill to sing Florencia’s sad songs and the radiant mezzo Suzanna Guzman to light fires under the music of the young Paula.

All this turned out as stronger, shapelier music than I remembered from 1997. Yes, the arias did run on somewhat. But the staging at the Ford also included some lively, attractive choral pieces and even, considering the limitations of the outdoor space, some clever shenanigans to suggest jungle and fog and the rest of the make-believe setting. The one real problem – throughout the evening, in fact – was the obviously slapped-together orchestra under the somewhat wobbly leadership of one Sean Bradley, “former army ranger, presidential escort, automobile repossessor and public school teacher.”

The program was presented under the aegis of Opera Nova, and was further burdened by a master of ceremonies, Michael Riggins, who managed to mispronounce nearly every name. Music by the excellent local composer Carlos Rodriguez began the program: a short fanfare and some enterprising interaction for cello (Matt Cooker) and electronics. Along the way the Uruguayan-born Miguel del Aguila came on to perform two movements from his Piano Concerto, a loosely glued-together concatenation of hilariously inept zingers from a Rachmaninoff scrapbook.

Two nights later, across the street at the Hollywood Bowl, there was almost exactly the same piece again, this time under the name of the Piano Concerto by the Brazilian composer Hekel Tavares, who died in 1969. Brazil, Uruguay, Moscow Conservatory: The program notes this time went on about the self-taught Senhor Tavares drawing his poetic inspiration from the forms of Brazilian folk song, and this may very well be, but once again the Rachmaninovian clatter o’ershadowed all: the virtuoso plink-plank, the belly-flop landing on the third-related modulation. I think you can buy that stuff in squeeze bottles nowadays.

Photo by Decca/Andrew Eccles

The sound of Renée Fleming in song belongs on that
shortlist of amenities – sunset through the Golden Gate, dinner at Matsuhisa – that make life on this planet preferable to all
others. Even through the iffy electronics at the Hollywood Bowl last week, even with a slapdash and wildly varied program in which some numbers were, by her own admission, wrong for her glowing talents, Fleming delivered a full evening’s worth of her famous enchantment. I left after her third encore – I didn’t want anything to interfere with my memory of her “Casta diva” (from Norma); for all I know, she may be up there singing still. She has sung here before, but only in recital; she makes her L.A. Opera debut (in La Traviata) season after next. With the San Diego Opera she has sung Dvorák’s Russalka, and I keep a tape of her “Song to the Moon” from that opera close at hand, as some
people keep Prozac. Hers is the voice that sounds the way
moonlight looks.

I love the way Fleming has broadened her repertory in the past few years without the condescension that some opera stars indulge in. At the Bowl she began with Handel – two arias from Rodelinda, which the Met is staging for her next season, with the coloratura in beautiful command and the voice so pure that the Italian words not only came through but even made sense. (Wouldn’t it have been smart to use the video screen for those?) Later there were Broadway songs: Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers and, as an encore, the Lullaby from Porgy – all delivered with real feeling, not the encumbrance of an opera diva manufacturing operatic emotion. There was also some classy operatic stuff: the Bolero from Verdi’s Sicilian Vespers (showoff music that she’ll probably never get to sing onstage, as she fessed up in her endearing running commentary) and a knockout performance of the one worthwhile piece from Catalani’s La Wally – the only opera, Fleming delightfully explained, in which the heroine commits suicide with the help of a passing avalanche.

Charm, humor and genuine musicianship over a wide swath: These were the elements of a superior evening, far beyond the on-paper promise of an evening of tidbits. The Philharmonic, under the Houston Grand Opera’s Patrick Summers, contributed handsomely. And so, I am pleased to report, did the Bowl itself, whose sight-and-sound electronics staff seems finally, a couple of weeks into the season, to be gaining command of the monster. Fleming’s voice was nicely microphoned, cushioned by surrounding air and well balanced with the orchestra. The uncoordinated roving by video cameras was kept to a minimum – a sensible decision, with something as beautiful as Fleming’s face to focus upon. Even so, with a program like this – listing 18 separate works (plus encores), with the print impossible to read after darkness sets in – it seems
like a waste of superior equipment not to run at least the names of selections, never mind the texts, across the screens. Such an omission communicates to the crowd that the music itself is
the least important part of the Bowl experience, and I am here
to disagree.

Karl Kohn – Vienna 1926, Harvard, Pomona since 1950 – is a distinguished and ongoing part of our musical history; so is his wife, Margaret, whom he met as a Harvard undergrad. As a two-piano team they performed Book II of Pierre Boulez’s Structures at a Monday Evening Concert in March 1965, celebrating the opening of LACMA and the composer’s 40th birthday. In November 1959, the Kohns had performed Book I of Structures at a previous Monday Evening Concerts venue, Fiesta Hall in Plummer Park. Walter Arlen, writing in the Los Angeles Times, found that the performers “produced cold and glassy sounds with astonishing sureness on two pianos which . . . surely must have been wired for agony.” Last week the Kohns again played Structures (Book II this time) at a special Monday Evening Concert put together to connect with LACMA’s “Beyond Geometry” Exhibition. Walter Arlen was in the audience, as he usually is for such events. Some things remain.

The “cold and glassy sounds wired for agony” this night might better refer to music earlier in the program, a John Cage proposition called 19”37.998′ for a Violin Player in which the fearless Johnny Chang drew sounds from Cage’s fragmentary scribbles on paper. These sounds, said the program, were meant to be heard by strollers as they moseyed through the extensive display of abstractions spread through the museum’s Anderson Building – an audible counterpart, if one was stirred to make the connection, to the varied visual intentions of the works on exhibit. Beyond the Cage work’s apparent intent to inspire from Chang’s instrument a constant stream of the most unappealing sounds imaginable, it had the happier result of turning the most abstruse components of the Kohns’ two-piano program across the plaza in the Bing Theater, by contrast, into lighthearted delight.

These included Steve Reich’s 1967 Piano Phase, music from Reich’s early fascination with effects reachable through tape phasing (as in his Come Out), music we once heard with a certain need for forbearance, perhaps some gentle mockery. All this is past; these early Reich works – Come Out most emphatically, and full-length performances of Drumming and this relatively brief Piano Phase – are part of a concert repertory of fundamental minimalist works from the last half-century, and I expect them to last.

About the Boulez Structures (either set) I am less sanguine. The freshness in the music the other night came from the Kohns’ vivid performance, the sense of conversational give and take as they fed each other the alternatives out of which each perfor-
mance can be built. But this is the music of a bygone Boulez even so: later than the astounding Marteau Sans Maître but somehow stillborn. György Ligeti’s wonderfully vivid Three Pieces of 1976 came in between: music bursting with vitality and wit and, in the last of the three, overflowing with glints of color both subtle and wild, as if a painter’s trove had suddenly overturned and drowned us all. Perhaps it was hearing these amazing small works that drained the vitality from the Boulez; they made for an act I would not have wanted to follow.

Photo by Christine Alcino

In the matter of togetherness programmed in heaven, try this for a night at the Hollywood Bowl: Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, with its roistering, rolling E-flat piano arpeggios before intermission; John Adams’ Grand Pianola Music, with its roistering, rolling E-flat piano arpeggios after.

The Beethoven, soberly but accurately played by Andreas Haefliger, with Ilan Volkov conducting the Philharmonic, drew a fair ovation from the paltry (5,500 out of 18,000) crowd. The Adams, with Gloria Cheng and Joanne Pearce Martin at the two pianos, drew the expected pitter-patter of applause with a few halfhearted boos. My memories of previous hearings of that work include a roof-raising chorus of cheers at the world premiere (San Francisco, 1982) and an equal volume of boos (New York, a year later). Maybe the warm summer air dampened reaction this time.

Those earlier outpourings – San Francisco pride of ownership versus New York xenophobia – were easily understood 20 years ago. The lingering hostility, considering the heights that Adams’ music has attained since then, is more troubling today. Adams created his Grand Pianola Music – mischievously, he has stated – as a respite, even a lark, after the ferocious self-declaration of Harmonium, his astounding choral work commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony and still refulgent in the repertory. Pianola rattles on, at some length to be sure, but congenially, with nothing more on its mind than a quest to reach E flat. It arrives via a constant nibbling and ultimately lands with a gigantic, Beethovenian whoosh – worthy not of the “Emperor” Concerto perhaps, but at least of some upper-echelon bad piece like, say, the “Triple” Concerto.

Adams has gone further, in directions not easy to predict at the time of the Pianola premiere, yet you can’t just dismiss this as an apprentice work. The exuberance that carries it forward to that climactic cataract remains inbred in his musical language. Works of even longer duration and even more discursive content – the Naïve and Sentimental Music, for one – rely on just that fund of ferocity to carry an audience around the bends and the upgrades. Years after Pianola, when Nixon in China had established Adams’ predominance among practitioners of his time, he said of the earlier work, “It’s the most thorough piece about who I am musically. It has a real streak of vulgarity about it, full of the vernacular of the American musical experience.” With a name like John Adams, what else would you expect?

My neighbors in the next box at the Bowl, whom I’ve gotten to know over the years in all but name – they give me cookies and stuff – loved all the E-flat adventures in the “Emperor” Concerto, but were reduced to groans and moans as soon as Adams’ equally pretty music began. “Oh, my God,” said the woman next to me, as trombone and tuba propounded a long-held dominant-seventh chord, perhaps a little more insistently scored than it would have been in Beethoven, but the same chord nevertheless. Fear stalks the land, and a name out of the new-music galaxy – Adams, Cage, perhaps even Salonen – can strike terror. There’s still work to be done.

More mischief. A report last week from one of The New York Times‘ roving critics told of opera stagings in Berlin: Mozart’s Abduction From the Seraglio, wherein the Pasha drags the heroine, Constanze, around on a leash and the hero, Belmonte, guns down some prostitutes; Verdi’s Don Carlo with the heretics duct-taped, doused with gasoline and torched with cigarette lighters. All this happens, of course, in the name of contemporary stagecraft; blow the dust off the old operatic attitudes, and a new art is born. In case this report stirs up envy and wanderlust, you can save a little travel money and check out instead the four parts of the new EuroArts DVD of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen – all 901 minutes – in which every scrap of Wagner’s explicit staging information has been subjected to the same quality of imagination that has guided the hand of the Messrs. Himmelmann and Bieito in Berlin.

The performances are from the Stuttgart Opera, first produced in 1999 (and, therefore, during the last year of Pamela Rosenberg’s leadership before she came to the San Francisco opera), revived and recorded in 2002-03. Each of the four dramas is the work of a different director, and the casts are almost all different as well: three Wotans, three Brünnhildes. One constant is the conductor, Lothar Zagrosek; the other constant is that nothing must look like anything

in any of Wagner’s dreams. No, I

take that back; the Prologue in Götterdämmerung is a rather pretty old-fashioned German mountain scene. But at the end of Siegfried, that same setting – the rock, after all, where Brünnhilde awakens after having been put to sleep – was an elegant bourgeois bedroom fresh out of Ethan Allen. And at the end of Die Walküre, that same “rock” where she was actually put to sleep was a bare table and chair downstairs in the Valkyries’ locker room. And let’s not get into the flowing blond tresses that the formerly brunette Brünnhilde somehow acquired during her 20-year nap.

Still here? Okay, so we have the Rhine Maidens splashing around in a catch basin down in the cellar of some office building, with elevators leading here and there. We have Sigmund transfixed by a mini-sword projected on a blank wall, and the Dragon Fafnir a homeless bum clinging to a chainlink fence. The Forest Bird is a blind sprite, a nice touch. At the end, the very end, when Wagner’s music spells out, note for note, the collapse of the old world and the blazing hope for a new one, the screen goes blank, and the plain letters of Wagner’s stage directions – poetic in themselves, I suppose – fill the screen, with no magic fire, no steam, nothing but a matronly Brünnhilde, standing to the side in a red dress.

I guess this, too, is the new European stagecraft: Forget what the music tells you, and just go off on your own. The pity is that it is expended here on a quite decent musical presentation. Zagrosek paces a surging performance that reaches eloquence in the perorations of all four works. There are excellent singers, none of them among today’s well-known stars, but all at least adequate and sometimes more: Lisa Gasteen, the Siegfried Brünnhilde; Tichina Vaughn, the Walküre Fricka; and a stunning bass named Roland Bracht, one of the few in double roles, the Fasolt in Das Rheingold and the Hagen in Götterdämmerung.

From Stuttgart too comes Achim Freyer’s legendary staging of Der Freischütz, Weber’s forest legend magically produced, with creatures out of Bosch and singers out of heaven. Dennis Russell Davies conducts on a Kultur DVD; Rosenberg had announced this for her first San Francisco season, then withdrew it for money reasons. Redemption is at hand.

The night sky in midsummer over the Athenian forest is fully dark; over Sweden’s northern latitudes it maintains a dusky twilight streaked with sunset reds. By delicious happenstance, both phenomena have been ours to observe and marvel at lately: the deep night of Shakespeare, via Mendelssohn, at the Hollywood Bowl; the “smiles” of Ingmar Bergman’s summer night, via Stephen Sondheim’s magical night music, continuing through the month at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion; both venues rendered sublime by context.

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has its own history at the Bowl. Survivors remain from the grandiose 1934 Max Reinhardt production, which, filmed a year later and decked out that time with Erich Korngold’s lush rewrite of the Mendelssohn score, still epitomizes Hollywood’s take on world culture. Mickey Rooney, the 14-year-old Puck of that production, was on hand in last week’s audience, his still-puckish grin magnified on the new video screens. A quick clip from the old movie made one wish for more. Throughout the evening, in fact – the summer’s first “classical” event after several weeks of assorted “family” folderol – the suspicion kept surfacing that the whole Bowl experience had become a new kind of media mix, perhaps for the better and perhaps not.

Shakespeare’s words, much abridged, were delivered this time not by Hollywood all-stars, but by the excellent local company A Noise Within, with imaginative sets and props easily pushed around the stage and occasionally sent aloft. Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic dispatched Mendelssohn’s airborne music straight, without the extra Korngold goop. (I have to admit, however, that the opening scene of the old movie, with monster forces intoning a choral version of the end of the “Scottish” Symphony, does warm my old vulgarian heart.) The vocal soloists, Heidi Grant Murphy and Stephanie Blythe, sang prettily of “spotted snakes” and “thorny hedgehogs” (and returned two nights later to sing of Eternal Life in Mahler’s Second Symphony). Everything that happened on the stage happened many times larger on the screens, if not always in coordination. (Did it occur to nobody that the screens might also have carried the texts for the songs?) A bassoon or clarinet solo in the orchestra was likely to show up on the screen as a close-up of a flutist or the string section. This is a serious matter; there is a real temptation to watch the screens rather than the stage, but the lack of coordination becomes a distraction.

This, then, is the new, improved Hollywood Bowl experience: no longer just a night out at a concert of one kind or another, with the option of food and drink and the mixed blessing of ambient sound, but all of these dwarfed by – and rendered subservient to – a nicely crafted, if clumsily managed, visual component. The metaphor of a roofless home theater comes to mind. But home theater, if I hear the Best Buy salesman correctly, goes in for a lot of loudspeakers surrounding the listening area front, back and sides, while the new sound setup at the Bowl has all the speakers down front, with the music microphoned through first-rate equipment but microphoned nonetheless. The previous sound system, with Frank Gehry’s fiberglass balls turning the stage into Starship Enterprise, employed 150 separate sound sources spread throughout the real estate; now there is one. Can it be that the sound engineers at the Bowl have spent all those millions to come up with the 2004 model of your grandfather’s Atwater Kent?

Summer music means different things to different people. I cling to memories of nights at Tanglewood, with perhaps 15,000 people spread out on the great lawn, the Boston Symphony off in the distance but clearly audible without a single microphone on the premises. There were no police helicopters overhead, no freeway within miles, no audience ears with standards perverted by home audio. This was a lifetime ago, but – except for the last part – I am told that it still happens. There is still a genuine pleasure in going to concerts at the Bowl, and some of it actually has to do with music. Salonen’s performance of the Mahler Second last week was a knockout, best of all when the offstage brass and percussion got going in the last movement (unamplified, by the way) and added a whole ‘nother dimension. From the stage, the amplified sound was loud and bright. Nobody could pretend, of course, that this is the natural sound of a flesh-and-blood symphony orchestra.

Stephen Sondheim’s elegant love games play off in soft twilight, in sight and – in the Dorothy Chandler’s new production of A Little Night Music – in sound as well. Slithery dancers dimly lit move to slithery, chromatic, ironic waltz rhythms. Nostalgia floods your brain: When was the first time you saw Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night? The second? With whom? Literature nowadays tends to metamorphose into musical settings via the movie versions: The operas carved out of Dead Man Walking, Gatsby, Streetcar all ended up as particularly loud soundtracks, betrayed by their composers’ inability to sense – and then to translate – the music inherent in the original medium. The special genius of A Little Night Music is that it does succeed in exactly that translation – not only the words of Bergman’s near-perfect film but their resonance. You come away enamored of both works in equal measure.

To an extent, it’s also the wonder of Sondheim’s word mastery that gives his work its caustic edge and, best of all, its rhythmic profile. Night Music is, famously, a work in waltz time, but it gleans a special zing when the words push it into 6/8: “per-PET-ual SUN-set is RA-ther an UN-sett-ling THING.” “Send in the Clowns” not only challenges the most beautiful theater songs of any era; nobody, since its 1973 first hearing, has come close. For a haunting ballad up there on the charts, it is remarkably structured: a series of phrases, each longer than the previous, thus rising to a climax both structural and emotional. Jonathan Tunick’s orchestration of the song, with clarinet predominating, evokes Mozart, who also knew how to build music this way.

Memories of my own conversation with Sondheim, circa 1972, come flooding back; Night Music was on his worktable, but Così Fan Tutte was his other obsession. The connections are easily made: the pairings of lovers who sunder and are then restored in more logical fashion; the cynicism; the resignation coupled with worldliness that comes together in music almost too beautiful to bear – Mozart’s lovers in their letter-writing quintet, “Send In the Clowns.” Above all there is the extraordinary mastery in both works of the kind of vocal-plus-dramatic counterpoint that conquers time: both of Mozart’s act finales, Sondheim’s “A Weekend in the Country.” You could suggest (but to what point?) that Don Giovanni might later have guided Sondheim’s pen in Sweeney Todd. Così and Night Music are definitely worthy of each other’s company, and of ours.

Photo by David Thompson

It will soon be 400 years since the world’s first operatic masterpiece seduced its first spellbound audience, in an elegant room at the Gonzaga Palace in Mantua, where model centaurs pawed the ground and drew fountains of water from the built-in plumbing, and where Apollo made his descent at the end in a golden chariot. By February 1607, opera was already 7 years old, but Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo gave the audience something it hadn’t experienced before: a large and varied ensemble of instruments to orchestrate the emotional climate of the work. When, in the second act, the Messenger interrupts the happy pastoral celebrations of Orpheus’ marriage with the news that his Eurydice has died, the whole sound-image darkens to illustrate the wrenchings in Monteverdi’s harmonies; the danceries of high strings give way to gambas and a small organ, and it’s as if Monteverdi has flicked a light switch. You can really say that opera, in the true implication of its dramatic and emotional potential, was born at that moment. When you hear it again, in the superb new recording on Virgin Classics’ Veritas label, the power of that scene remains intact.

Matters of musicological accuracy aside, this new release is a splendid performance that, at least, sounds right. It is led from the harpsichord by Emmanuelle Haïm, with the small ensemble of European Voices and Le Concert d’Astrée, a wondrous group of all the right instruments – including a ferocious, gruff “regal” (a primitive organ) for the bellowing of the recalcitrant Charon, the boatman at the River Styx. Purists afflicted with perfect pitch need to be warned, however: The recording is tuned up to an “authentic” A = 465 Hz.

The Orpheus is Ian Bostridge, the marvelous, sensitive young Brit who seems currently to own the “can do no wrong” territory that laps over into art song and contemporary opera. (His Caliban in Thomas Adès’ The Tempest is a thing of high wonderment.) Particularly admirable is Bostridge’s management of the curiosities of Monteverdian ornamentation – the repeated-note trills, for example – that other singers have turned into affectations but which Bostridge makes, properly, into simple emphases of the vocal line. Alice Coote – the Ruggero in the San Francisco Opera’s Alcina a couple of seasons ago – has the Messenger’s heartbreaking lines; Natalie Dessay is the delightful La Musica in the prologue, inviting us to share in her power “to soothe all troubled hearts.” How right she is!

Bostridge is with us again in another heartstring-tearing baroque opera, Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, an Aeneas lighter in voice than we expect, which disturbs us for about six notes of his first solo and nowhere thereafter. Wherever the truth may lie in the actual history of this work – whose origin is shrouded in conflicting legend – Dido remains a one-of-a-kind piece of work. Italian opera of the sung-through variety had not gained a foothold in Purcell’s England; the episodic masquelike pieces interspersed with spoken interludes were more favored.

Yet here was this one intense miniature by Purcell with that old-fashioned, Monteverdian power to stop the breath and draw the tear, as the Italian master had managed seven and eight decades before.

Aeneas himself may be something of a swaggering boob;
he gives in far too easily to the gods’ command to abandon his little love nest and sail on, and is equally willing to reverse his decision at the first sign of Dido’s tantrum. But Dido’s final scenes constitute one of music’s great tragedies – not only her “farewell” song but the recitative leading to it (“Thy hand, Belinda”) and the wrenching segue to the final chorus (“With drooping wings”). If you can breathe during this music, it isn’t being properly performed.

Once again the performing forces, on Virgin/Veritas, include Emmanuelle Haïm with her European Voices and Le Concert d’Astrée, and the Dido is that other do-no-wrong artist, our own Susan Graham, who has us in the aisles with her Offenbach one day and shivering with the raw tragedy of the wronged Queen Dido the next. The role is well-enough known to have become a repertory piece for a certain kind of commanding, regal singer – usually, alas, toward the later end of their careers. Kirsten Flagstad’s famous recording is a case in point, with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as her sidekick Belinda, also locked in combat with age and with the English text. Performances like this excellent new one – and others of note, including one on Harmonia Mundi by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson conducted by Nicholas McGegan – at least serve to rescue this very grand, if very small, opera from the plaything category.

On Virgin DVD there is more Monteverdi to treasure, his penultimate opera, The Return of Ulysses, which came to us in the Netherlands Opera’s abridged but gloriously tricky production not so many years ago. (“Return, O return,” cry we, echoing Penelope’s words from her great lament.) This one is not abridged, not tricky, and no less glorious, a production from the 2000 Aix-en-Provence Festival, created by Adrian Noble and performed by William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants, which comes to us far too seldom. (Return, O return.) Unlike L’Orfeo, Ulysses was created for a ticket-buying, not an invited aristocratic, audience; its orchestral and scenic resources were therefore modest. But Monteverdi, 30 years after L’Orfeo, had become a master of vocal expression. From the opening prologue to the final scenes, when the returned Ulysses breaks through Penelope’s 20-year ache and convinces her that he is really he, the intensity – the absolute rightness — of these musical lines holds you in their grasp. The orchestra is small: strings, a couple of winds, a nicely varied contingent of continuo instruments; the chorus numbers five. That’s all it takes for three hours of sheer delight.

I wrote some time ago, with praise bordering on ecstasy, about Peter Sellars’ production of Theodora at Glyndebourne when it was released on VHS; now it, too, is on DVD. Against the chaste authenticity of the aforementioned Monteverdi and Purcell, this release, on Kultur Video, offers a different kind of delight but a delight nevertheless. Handel’s oratorio deals with self-sacrificial love between a Christian virgin and a Roman soldier; Sellars has reset it in today’s America – simply and, if you think for a moment, convincingly. More to the point, his performers are Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and David Daniels, with, once again, William Christie conducting. With that cast of characters, you could stage the work on a four-level freeway and it would work.

P.S. The L.A. Opera’s A Little Night Music, which opened this past weekend, is an altogether enchanting production of the work I regard as America’s most beautiful stage musical. I plan to verify these words half a dozen times, for pure pleasure, during this one-month run, and so should you. More next week.

In one of those imponderable ironies by which the music industry slowly but surely succeeds in cannibalizing its own, the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Wing on Wing will be made not by Salonen’s Los Angeles Philharmonic (for which it was written), in the Walt Disney Concert Hall (whose architecture it celebrates), but half a planet away in Helsinki, by the Finnish Radio Orchestra. The reason, it should not surprise you to learn, is money.

I don’t have the exact figures involved in this case, but I do for a parallel situation reported in last week’s New York Times Sunday magazine. The New York Philharmonic management recently learned that John Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls, which he composed for that orchestra in 2002 as a memorial for 9/11, was slated to be recorded by a London orchestra rather than its own, since the cost differential would be something like $40,000 as against $95,000. In that case, an enraged New York Philharmonic patron came up with the difference. I would not hang by my thumbs expecting a similar resolution in Los Angeles, especially since the D.G. recording also includes two other Salonen works, of which one (Insomnia) hasn’t yet been heard here. (I would, of course, be delighted to be proved wrong.)

This is all part of a dark cloud that overhangs classical music these days. Domestic orchestral recording by the major orchestras on the major labels has all but stopped; what persists are the few projects of individual orchestras producing and marketing performances on their own labels – as in San Francisco – but, of course, without the blockbuster promotion that RCA and Sony were once able to accord the Boston, New York and Los Angeles orchestras. The irony aches especially in the case of Wing on Wing, since the piece comes wrapped in so many layers of pride – with, at the core, music of exceptional beauty and delight.

As I read through the printed score for several days before the two performances I heard, that sense of pride was as clearly visible as the notes themselves, in the care with which Salonen had mapped out the movements of the solo musicians – the two singers and the two deep-toned wind instruments that impersonated some kind of marine specimen. The voice of Frank Gehry intrudes now and then, as part of the obbligato of pride that pervades the work. No matter how clear the tape, will that voice, that identity, transplant to a Finnish recording studio? Against the complexity of other works – the hugely successful LA Variations and the manic turmoil of Insomnia, which I’ve heard on a pirate disc – this is, for Salonen, a lighter piece; it has some of the cold, clear wind of his homeland, without the murk that his musical ancestor seemed fond of stirring up. It does him proud, and us, too.

Cool heads at the season’s beginning warned that all might not fall into place at Disney Hall the first time out, that there would be kinks and that patience might be in order. Those wise words notwithstanding, dissing Disney soon became the town’s newest game. Horror stories resounded: longtime Philharmonic patrons becoming lost on their way to their newly assigned seats; neighbors in nearby condos suffering sunstroke brought on by afternoon reflections from the stainless steel; tender knees, shoulders and ankles shattered from the unconscionably narrow spaces between rows in the upper reaches. A broadside, widely circulated, contained assurances by a USC professor to the New Jersey Classical Society that the excellences of Disney Hall’s acoustics were just another of those Hollywood myths.

There are, indeed, problems in the new hall, of magnitude great and small. It is somewhat embarrassing to contemplate the blanket currently flung over the shiniest part of the steel exterior, where the afternoon sun bears down; presumably someone will get up there with a Brillo pad one of these days and dull the surface down. It is equally embarrassing, it seems to me, to pay 14 bucks for an entrée in the café downstairs and be asked to deal with it with plastic “silverware.” The space between rows is narrower than at the Dorothy Chandler, where the space had to be wide because the rows themselves were so long. I find the creature discomforts easier to deal with than the aesthetic discomfort of the garish floral pattern on the seats (and carpets) themselves. That goes with plastic forks.

The gardens, and the outdoor spaces in general, have turned out exactly as I had hoped: a beautiful thing to have happened in the middle of what has always been a basically nondescript city. They put the rest of the Music Center to shame. The two small outdoor theaters have begun to be well used for children’s entertainments, and it has been fun to watch people improvising uses for them even when they’re otherwise empty. The gardens themselves are just plain wonderful, at intermissions and also in the daytime. Early on, I wished they had installed name tags for the plants and trees, or at least pamphlets with maps as at national parks. Now I’ve learned to admire the area in the abstract. The gardens are a success, and so is the garage. Whatever it took to plan a space with such ease of access and exit, I wish someone would cross the street and teach it to the rest of the Music Center.

“The wood simply acts as a highly reflective surface,” says this idiotic paper from New Jersey, “making sound waves bounce around and impact against the surfaces, thus creating a harsh acoustic environment.” I don’t know where Professor Noll was when the sound waves of Salonen’s Berlioz impacted against the walls of Disney Hall this season, or when the solo-wind writing at the start of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps stood out like etched monoliths, or when the wintry chill of Matthias Goerne and Alfred Brendel’s Schubert turned the very air of the hall to hoarfrost. Yes, there were other occasions less perfect, when rethinking was in order. The hall did not serve the needs of the new Golijov chamber opera, or the acted-out monkeyshines imposed upon the Berlioz Fantastique, both of which challenged the hall’s still-imperfect amplification system. Okay; it was a new hall, a new stage, a new space, and the only way to find out what works (and what doesn’t) was by doing it.

Night after night, in this proverbial cultural desert, you could see the lines stretching from the Disney Hall box office up Grand Avenue to First Street and beyond, hoping in vain for cancellations. They built it, and you came.

The management has changed, but not the balls. The Long Beach Opera was back in business with the usual offering of repertory no other company would dream of taking on, and with the usual daredevil production values that endear this off-the-wall enterprise to the hardy, come-what-may crowd that came close to selling out Cal State Long Beach’s Carpenter Auditorium for four performances over two weekends midmonth. Nobody will pretend that our operatic lives were immeasurably enriched by the discovery of Richard Strauss’ The Silent Woman or of Astor Piazzolla’s Maria of Buenos Aires; in the first of these instances, I might argue just the opposite, in fact. But the total phenomenon of dedicated, inventive work lavished on repertory off the beaten path, of manners of performance within shoestring circumstances with something new and important to tell us – even occasionally about a work we think we already know – that’s what Michael Milenski gave us in the 25 years of his Long Beach Opera, and what Andreas Mitisek seems poised to carry forward in his new leadership.

Mitisek has been the company’s principal conductor for the past several years; he also founded and led a small company in Vienna apparently similar to Long Beach. That background probably accounts for the Strauss in his bloodstream; he led a creditable Elektra here a few years ago. Die schweigsame Frau, however, is decidedly lower-rung Strauss, a tired, overextended attempt that reworks the old farce-comedy routine of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale et al. at twice the length. Ben Jonson’s Epicene, from which Stefan Zweig drew his libretto, has the old bachelor duped into marrying a “silent woman” who then turns out to be a boy; there is no such gender crossover, therefore no such fun, in the Zweig-Strauss. Back in its carefree days, Long Beach might have better known how to deal with such matters. The opera is seldom done, and with good reason. A meticulously rehearsed performance, its ensembles controlled with Mozartian precision, might put it over; that would take months to prepare, and not even the most ardent Straussian – which I am ardently not – could claim it worth the while. This version, for all the valiant staging creativity of Isabel Milenski and John Collins’ clever breakaway scenery, clearly radiated the usual Long Beach make-do philosophy.

Piazzolla’s sad little portrait of loveless street life in Argentina’s capital, throbbing with his sour rhythms and with Horacio Ferrer’s sordid verses, was decidedly worth the while, but was somewhat undervalued in John Lloyd Davies’ production, which prized stage trickery (dancing chairs) over forthright musical power. The onstage orchestra, with Mitisek at the piano, seemed underpowered; perhaps a few more bandoneons would have helped. With all my respect for preserving a composer’s original visions, I have to assert that the Gidon Kremer re-orchestration of the piece, on the Teldec recording, comes a lot closer to the steamy essence of the music – with the decided further advantage of the great Ferrer to read his own verses. In Long Beach, at least, Noelia Moncada’s Maria had a bewitching intensity; at the moments when she commanded an observer’s eyes and ears, you knew what was right, unique and endearing about this one-of-a-kind opera company.

“With all my respect,” as I was saying, I have to confess that the Boston Baroque’s clean, “authentic” performance of Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespro Della Beata Vergine that ended Disney Hall’s Baroque Variations series a couple of weeks ago aroused a certain nostalgia for those terrible old recordings that were just as wrong as wrong could be. You know the ones: the Harvard and Radcliffe glee clubs, maybe 300 strong; the whole brass contingent of the Boston Symphony; E. Power Biggs on the mighty organ; and the Bellini painting of those massed forces whooping it up in the Piazza San Marco. That would have made the two hours pass fleetingly by, as Martin Pearlman’s musicologically trained forces did not.

A pileup of scheduling earlier in the month at both ends of the Music Center made it impossible to get up to Ojai for most of this year’s festival, which was interesting and varied under Thomas Morris’ new leadership. Next year’s programs – the Cleveland Orchestra in residence, with the splendid composer/conductor Oliver Knussen in charge – are scheduled for later in June and are, thus, easier of access. I heard this year’s final concert: Kent Nagano leading his Los Angeles Opera Orchestra in a supple and tidy jaunt through the Beethoven Fourth Symphony – music that I love for all kinds of new reasons at every hearing – and a couple of novelties. One was Arnold Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden, a brief prayer for peace to words by Conrad Meyer in the intense, pre-atonal style of the First Chamber Symphony, compellingly sung by a small chorus as a quick segue after the Beethoven. (Earlier on the program, an orchestral version of the same music had been less successful.) The other was snagS Snarls, five small and not very revealing bits, cutely sung by Margaret Thompson, from an Alice in Wonderland opera-in-progress by the extraordinary Korean composer Unsuk Chin, a lot of whose recent music has the world abuzz. The opera is due here in the L.A. Opera’s ’05-’06 season; Chin’s spellbinding Violin Concerto, which pulled down a $200,000 Grawemeyer award last year, is scheduled at Nagano’s Berkeley Symphony this coming September.

Suddenly, there is no more Leonard Stein to lend his beaming, lanky presence to the most enterprising of our concerts, to punctuate the events with the pithy commentary whose fortissimo delivery he could not have controlled even if he had so wished. He left us quickly, in a series of seizures at age 87 last weekend, just in time to miss a dinner party to celebrate one of the latest of his good deeds, the 10th birthday of the Piano Spheres concert series, in which five remarkable pianists (himself included until last year) assumed the absolute right to explore music most meaningful to them without regard to commercial program building. Before that series there had been the leadership of the Schoenberg Institute, maintained and then dumped by USC, the model of a research-plus-performance facility too precious for a growth-obsessed university to understand. Before that there had been the service to Schoenberg himself, as teaching assistant, good right hand, and editor of writings and compositions. It will be a long time, therefore, before our musical life shakes free of his influence – or just the echo of that voice.