So I've Heard

The interesting thing about turning 80 is how much of the old stuff still clings. In the last few years, I’ve resumed contact with my two best friends from Boston Latin, the two most responsible for my involvement in classical music, Normie Wilson and Eddie Levin. From before high school I have paltry musical memories: failed piano lessons with a birdlike spinster at age 6, years in bed with rheumatic fever and a tinny radio playing dance-band hits. At 14, I modulated into a brighter key. Normie played the piano – better than Paderewski, it seemed to me at the time. He played a fancy solo from the Grieg Piano Concerto at every school assembly, and so that concerto was the first recording I bought. Eddie collected records, so I heard a lot of music at his house. My mnemonic for the opening of the “Eroica” was “The worms crawl in . . .”

Eddie’s records all had program notes, and I remember being fascinated by the ways you could describe music in words. My first records came on some cheapo label without program notes, so I wrote my own. Something about this accomplishment really inflated my own self-image (which needed inflation at the time, since my premed studies, mostly undertaken to indulge my parents’ “my son the doctor” ambitions, were going nowhere). Somebody in physics lab one day showed me a book by Sir Donald Francis Tovey full of marvelous musical descriptions: A main theme in César Franck’s symphony returns “striding grandly in its white confirmation dress.” From that moment on there was nothing I wanted to do more than write about music. In Harvard’s music department there was the spellbinding G. Wallace Woodworth, who could lecture on musical form so that every transition became a cliffhanger worthy of a Saturday-matinee serial. A course with Woody on classical symphonies further stoked my passion. A letter to Rudolph Elie, music critic of the Boston Herald, taking issue with some trivial point he had raised about a Mozart symphony and awash in self-importance, got me the offer of a job as a stringer at three bucks a column. After graduation (in 1945) it was on to New York, where stringers at the New York Sun advanced to the lordly sum of $7.50. There was no turning back. I have all that stuff in a box. Wild horses couldn’t get me to look at it.

Even so, the contents of that box were enough to persuade UC Berkeley to overlook my lousy pre-med grade points from Harvard and admit me as a graduate student in music. I had the idea that a solid musical education might set me apart from most music critics, even at the expense of time spent singing correct intervals and working out 16th-century counterpoints. From Roger Sessions – speaking oraclelike through a dense cloud of pipe smoke – I learned to chart the exquisite logic of classical structure on huge expanses of squared paper. From humanist musicologist Joseph Kerman – soft-spoken and immensely witty – I learned how music reaches its hearers through the interplay of a work’s own logic with the usage of its era. Blending these two kinds of teaching, I learned how to get music into my bloodstream. One sublime example was my discovery, in a Mozart seminar, of the G-minor String Quintet. When I decided to write this article, that one work clicked into place. Thirty-three years ago, halfway between Berkeley and today, I had already found the words for that particular obsession. (See sidebar.)

Schubert was another Berkeley discovery, thanks largely to Leon Kirchner, a fellow grad student and already an important composer. Leon had the magnificence of spirit to tolerate my terrible piano playing, and we shared in amazed discovery of this great composer’s four-hand piano pieces – the F-minor Fantasy, the A-flat Variations – that nobody seemed to know at the time. Thus inspired, I did my M.A. thesis on Schubert, earned a year abroad, and returned with every expectation of a career in advanced scholarship. My Ph.D. orals, wherein it was assumed that I could recite from memory such burning issues as the content of the card catalogs of major libraries, suggested the necessity of finding other paths.

Actually, I had already embarked on one. Berkeley in the 1950s was the home of KPFA, the first-ever venture in non-commercial, listener-supported broadcasting, with all the maverick programming those concepts entailed. I joined the staff after returning from Europe, resigned a few months later, then came back after one of the frequent palace revolts. Our doors were open to politicians and philosophers of all stripes, and to composers as well; I encountered new music and its creators not on the UC campus but down the hill in KPFA’s makeshift studios: Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, John Cage, Ravi Shankar. I put Pierre Boulez on the air during his first American visit, and I cherish my tape of three local composers totally undone by every one of this arrogant young Frenchman’s revolutionist theories. The San Francisco Symphony was in the hands of an inadequate conductor named Enrique Jordá, whom the society dames adored and whom the newspaper critics at least tolerated. I didn’t, in my weekly tirades, and one of KPFA’s major donors, J.D. Zellerbach of the toilet-paper millions, threatened to withdraw his support. KPFA’s founder, the visionary Lewis Hill, told him to climb a tree.

In 1960, KPFA acquired WBAI as its New York outlet, and I was sent to help run things, as St. Paul to the Romans. This provoked a clash between my California idealism and New York political hardball beyond the powers of my gamesmanship. One day I walked over to The New York Times and asked whether they needed another music critic. As it happened, they did. As low man in a five-man department, I covered a steady stream of sad, hopeful debuts, usually at 5:30 on Saturday afternoons, when Carnegie Recital Hall could be rented on the cheap, and quite a few first-performance-on-this-planet events whose perpetrators imagined as advancing the cause of new music. Sometimes, however, they were right; my days at KPFA had softened my sympathetic ear toward the early escapades of Yoko Ono, the topless cellist Charlotte Moorman and the outpourings of La Monte Young, whose fortnightlong recitals on a single sustained note represented the birth pangs of what would later take on the name of “minimalism.” I think I was fairly successful in isolating a thread of sanity in these events, even when my presence in the hall represented half the audience.

You couldn’t pretend that the cause of new music was getting much support from the New York press, however. Harold Schonberg, the Times‘ top critic, demanded that his one staff member with compositional talent, Eric Salzman, choose between the two hats; Eric chose composition and departed. In 1963, when the Herald Tribune offered me the top job to replace its retiring critic, Columbia musicologist Paul Henry Lang, the only message Lang had to offer at the changing-of-the-guard lunch was the hope that I would continue his vendetta against his Ivy League composer colleagues. I’m afraid I let him down.

Lincoln Center opened Philharmonic Hall in 1962, and its other components soon after, setting the pattern of the cultural supermarket that other cities soon followed – Los Angeles with its Music Center in 1964. Governmental subsidy for the arts, with all its enablements and its dangers, became a reality in 1965. Leonard Bernstein strode to glory on his New York Philharmonic podium and in the national media as well. He even attempted to drag his orchestra into a confrontation with the present day, programming an “avant-garde festival” of music by John Cage, Pierre Boulez and other violators of the public tranquillity. Having no real feeling for this kind of music, he turned the event into a laff riot. “If you can understand what this music is all about,” he told the audience one night, “please tell me.” “Mr. Bernstein used everything short of a Flit gun to wipe out the avant-garde at Philharmonic Hall last night,” I wrote in one of my first days at the Herald Tribune.

Eventually the Trib succumbed, except for its Sunday magazine, boasting its Milton Glaser artwork and its with-it masthead – Tom Wolfe, Gail Sheehy, Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem, Clay Felker and me – which survived as New York magazine and which flourishes still. It was at New York – thanks not so much to Felker’s editorial guidance as to his willingness to leave me alone – that I assumed the freedom to invent the kind of first-person, personally involved writing about music that I did then and have been doing ever since.

By 1970 the skies brightened perceptibly over the new-music scene. Boulez took over from Bernstein on the Philharmonic podium, bearing the news that the musical establishment might have a message or two for young ears about the vitality in the contemporary creative scene. Kids in jeans showed up for meet-the-composer concerts at Alice Tully Hall, and for informal Boulez “Encounters” in Greenwich Village. There was talk of minimalism, and it blended with talk of Dylan and Perotin and Mahler and Stockhausen. In later years, several hundred thousand people would swear they were at the Metropolitan Opera House on the two November nights in 1976 for the Philip Glass–Robert Wilson Einstein on the Beach.

In 1979, New York cloned itself as New West, and I was dispatched here to function for a year as a bicoastal music critic. California’s principal orchestras had distinguished new conductors: Edo de Waart in San Francisco and Carlo Maria Giulini in Los Angeles. Opera was thriving up north, and there were stirrings in Los Angeles and San Diego. I was to find a critic for classical music on the West Coast, turn over the keys to the kingdom, and return to the real world. Instead I’m still here. The new-music scene in Southern California was lively and well-run, yet held in durance vile under the snide negativism of the Los Angeles Times‘ Martin Bernheimer, who fancied himself the incarnation of Austria’s Eduard Hanslick but merely ‰ skimmed off Hanslick’s virtuosic vitriol, with little of his profound aesthetic sensibility. It saddened me to attend interesting concerts here and overhear audiences parroting Bernheimerisms in the guise of musical wisdom. From such a dragon Los Angeles needed and deserved rescue. Within three months, Bernheimer and I were no longer speaking, a situation that did not forfeit me my claim to have truly lived.

I made the rounds through local journalism: New West and its equally hapless successor California, KUSC, KFAC, Newsweek, the Herald Examiner of fond memory. The day the Her-Ex folded, I was actually on the Times‘ payroll for approximately three hours; guess whose foot went down on that one. Never mind; when Bernheimer finally gave up on his efforts to remake Los Angeles as Vienna West and departed eastward, the Times hired Mark Swed, a fellow enthusiast in matters of contemporary music. The Times came out ahead, I came out ahead, and the two of us now give the area a lively musical outlook that not many American cities can match.

When I arrived in Los Angeles, the musical power structure was uniquely strong and active, and it gave the lie to the suspicions my New York friends frequently voiced, that I was out of my mind to give up a power job in the East and move out to where nothing ever happens. The Philharmonic’s Ernest Fleischmann had taken unto himself a lot of the music director’s prerogatives, which had made Giulini happy and, before him, Zubin Mehta. It enabled Fleischmann to scour the world for young talent: Esa-Pekka Salonen and Simon Rattle on the podium, and the lamented Robert Harth in the front office. It also encouraged Fleischmann to create brave new programs like the “Green Umbrella” series, and promote them properly. Lawrence Morton was still on hand here; he had run adventurous new-music concerts, first as “Evenings on the Roof” on a rooftop studio in Silver Lake in 1939, now as the “Monday Evening Concerts” at the County Museum (where they’re still going on, under Dorrance Stalvey’s astute leadership). Leonard Stein, Arnold Schoenberg’s right-hand assistant at one time, ran the Schoenberg Institute at USC and organized musical events and symposia all over town. And Betty Freeman spent her money wisely to pay composers’ rent and underwrite recordings of their music, and invited them to her home to talk about their music to small gatherings and have it performed by excellent local musicians.

Win a few, lose a few. Los Angeles finally gained its long-overdue professional opera company, although there was some ominous symbolism in the fact that the opening-night curtain on the company’s first-ever performance, in October 1986, stuck halfway up and resisted all efforts at dislodging for several throat-tightening minutes. Ambassador Auditorium, Pasadena’s ideal small concert hall, was shuttered in the collapse of its fundamentalist governing board and looms unused to this day. The excellent Sequoia String Quartet fell victim to internal dissent, as did the well-attended Chamber Music L.A. concert series at the Japan America. After two or three exhilarating seasons of amazing fare brought in from all over – including Osvaldo Golijov’s St. Mark Passion and György Ligeti’s Piece for 100 Metronomes – Orange County’s Eclectic Orange Festival appears to have been squeezed dry, from the look of next season’s ordinary playlist. Inside and out, however, Walt Disney Concert Hall sounds almost as good as it looks, and gives the concept of music in Los Angeles an enhanced stature at a time when that kind of boost is sorely needed.

Music, it is an open secret, is in bad shape: orchestras folding, composers reduced to waiting on tables. Criticism, oddly enough, may be in better shape, so long as people realize why it’s important. I write criticism as a way of reporting on the rise and fall of the cultural health of the community. Sure, most of the events I write about are history by the time my report gets into print. What remains, I like to think, is the extent of my reaction: The fact that I got worked up about Esa-Pekka Salonen’s performance of such-and-such a new work, or Mitsuko Uchida’s way with a Schubert sonata, or Robert Wilson’s staging of Madama Butterfly, will make people want to experience these people’s work the next time around. A city that can support, and fill, a Walt Disney Concert Hall night after night – and can turn out in fair numbers for an all-Bartók concert at the County Museum, and for Jordi Savall’s viola da gamba at the Getty – is the city I feel like writing to, sharing my enthusiasms with. When I run out of great performances to write about, there is always great music to be discovered and, a few years later, rediscovered. I don’t think I will ever run out of new things to discover in the Beethoven “Eroica.” Or that Mozart quintet. Or Renée Fleming singing Schubert’s “Nacht und Träume.” Or . . .

When New York magazine gave me a page of my own, with the implication that I could be trusted to write about whatever interested me so long as I kept the magazine out of the courts, I succumbed to the delusion that I knew something about everything. Those early pages, which I keep as a kind of memento mori, contain some pretty embarrassing stuff from beyond my field of awareness, about Balanchine’s choreography and rock roll. I got a free trip to London from RCA to hear its new star David Bowie, and came back with a clever headline – “I’ve Been to London To Visit the Queen” – and no valid information at all. My worst howler, long before New York, was to condemn Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms as “sentimental.” (It didn’t, you see, sound like the Rite of Spring, which was the only Stravinsky I knew.)

Rich in 2004 (Photo by Debra DiPaolo)

If I’ve learned anything over the past few decades, it has been that there is nothing disgraceful in recognizing one’s own limitations and operating within them. My admirable colleague, The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross – 45 years younger by his own admission – is doing now, wisely, what I tried to do, unwisely, back then. With the background and the breadth of intellect that I only imagined I possessed, he has reinvented musical criticism and made it stick, relocating the boundaries of the territory so that he can write about Sonic Youth and the Beethoven Fifth and locate them exactly in the broader scheme of things. His long article from last February, “Listen to This,” a map of the territory brilliantly plotted and drawn, is on his Web site (www.therestis noise.com), and it’s required reading. It tells me, as clearly as any evidence I’ve come across in a very long time, that there’s hope for us, after all, and for music, too. So far, in other words, so good.

Henry Brant is on my conscience. Nimble, animated, instantly lovable in his sunglasses and engineer’s cap, this 91-year-old sprite talks about his music, and talks and talks. He is, let’s face it, cute, and the crowd eats him up; it disturbs me that I cannot be of their number.

He has his act down pat, and loosed it twice on adoring audiences during last week’s “Building Music” celebrations: once at the Green Umbrella concert at Disney, when his Verticals Ascending was played, and again at the Getty Center to bring on a whole evening of his music. The act consists of a zigzag journey through history, wherein precedent for his compositional style – the notion of spreading performers in and around the available space – is to be found in the famous 40-part Spem in Alium motet by Thomas Tallis and the spot in Don Giovanni where Mozart sets three dance bands playing against one another in different meters. Does it matter that in both cases the different parts are performing the same harmonies and, therefore, filling in the same texture? Not to Henry it doesn’t.

“Spatial music,” he calls the hundreds of pieces he has composed since the ’50s. At Disney, it pleased him to seize upon the spatial temptations of opposite sides of the stage (a horizontal setting for a piece about verticals – the Watts Towers – but never mind); at Getty, the stage, balcony and several spots among the seats; in a sports arena at St. Paul on a recent recording, choirs, orchestras, bagpipe bands and jazz bands, etc. (One thing to realize is that nothing, but nothing, of Brant’s music works on a recording; all you hear is the bad music reduced by one dimension. You have to be there, with perhaps a trombone in the row behind you blasting into your ear.) I found the music at the Getty concert consistently awful: run-of-the-mill dissonance with no real stylistic identity, its interest not at all heightened by the tricky placement of instruments. The worst of it by far – its dullness a matter of physical pain – was an aimless string quartet (the third of a set of four, the composer warns us), with two cellos onstage, a viola across the aisle to my left, a violinist upstairs: an exact denial, in other words, of why string quartets had been invented.

All this took place, mind you, in the week when the Philharmonic and its massed forces delivered the ultimate testimonial to space, and to the rightness of its need for a new concert hall, and to the splendor of the one it has been given. I have no proof that the dimensions of the Berlioz Requiem formed the template for Frank Gehry’s architectural designs for this hall of everybody’s dreams. This, however, I am willing to bet: When Esa-Pekka Salonen turned on his podium to cue in the forces spread across the upper reaches of Disney Hall to “scatter the trumpet’s awesome sound across the graves of the land,” a blind person could have sketched the outlines of Gehry’s masterpiece from that gorgeous blast of authentic, archetypal, spatial music.

That moment is, of course, the most famous of all in this extraordinary work, and it remains brightest in my memories

of the few live performances I’ve heard. There were other details in Salonen’s performance that I’ve never heard so beautifully shaped, in person or on disc: the horrifying brass intrusions into the Lacrymosa; the sense of vast space – three flutes, eight trombones, nothing in between – in the Hostias; the ethereal clangor of 10 (!) pairs of cymbals, pianissimo, behind Eric Cutler’s eloquent Sanctus. From the evidence of this sovereign

performance, and the concerts earlier this season, it’s clear that among Salonen’s exceptional abilities is a remarkable regard for the richness of the Berlioz sound and, more than that, the subtlety and occasional pitfalls in dealing with his textures. Berlioz’s music – complex, inward, secretive but bathed in its own kind of magnificence – has always needed its champions. To the small but distinguished list – Thomas Beecham, Charles Münch, Colin Davis – Salonen has become a worthy addition.

Surrounding Brant’s Verticals Ascending, last week’s Green Umbrella, the last of the season, was all about building-inspired music, with Stravinsky’s Canticum Sacrum (a cold-hearted, meticulously inscribed love note to Venice’s Basilica of San Marco) a last-minute addition. Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel was the program’s one masterpiece; it ended the evening in a radiant flush of near silence. If ever a piece of music achieved the crossing-over to capture the sense of a physical space, this sublime creation surely does. In its 30 minutes (for Feldman, a mere sneeze), a wordless chorus touches on small points of vocal tone, a vibraphone and celesta deliver distant plinks over distant thunder from the timpani, and a solo viola fashions a fragment of melody – all to conjure, with amazing exactitude, the intense experience of being in the namesake small building in Houston.

Edgard Varèse’s Poème Electronique began the program, a tape piece from 1958 created for Le Corbusier’s Phillips Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair and pretty much an antique of proto-electronic bloops and bleeps. In an elementary way, the sweeping lines of the piece do seem to mirror the shape of the building. Varèse was fascinated by the potential of the new media, and was deeply into experimentation at the time of his death; one can only speculate. At a later concert last week, Iannis Xenakis’ Metastaseis provided an interesting contrast. This too was music composed under Le Corbusier’s influence; Xenakis, both composer and architect, planned the orchestral work so that the visual aspect of the score influenced the

design of the same Brussels building for which Varèse would later compose.

About Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Wing on Wing, which had its first performance in a one-time-only concert last Saturday, I will have more to say later; the Philharmonic has granted the rare indulgence of a repeat performance this weekend, the season’s final program. The work’s title comes from sailing; its hero is Frank Gehry, his idealistic and creative dreams, his passion for sailing and for designing beautiful concert halls. The setting is oceanic; the words of Gehry, straight or processed, mingle with wordless siren songs sung (wonderfully) by sopranos – Jamie Chamberlin and Hila Plitmann – who wander through the hall. This all seems to float on a billowing orchestra that laps up against Debussy now and then and even crackles with a few Sibelian icicles – without ever once sounding like anything but what it is: exhilarating new and original music by a consummate master of his orchestra and its surroundings. I can’t wait to hear it again.

There is no ballet in Verdi’s Il Trovatore as composed in 1853; one was added, to accord with the demands of Parisian taste, for Le Trouvère in 1857, its music an anonymous hodgepodge of garish re-orchestrations of parts of the Gypsy-camp music from a previous scene. For reasons beyond fathoming, the Los Angeles Opera’s 1998 production was burdened with a restoration of a pared-down version of this ballet, and it has been allowed to remain in the current revival. How insane this decision has
been should become clear when I relate the action of Andrew George’s choreography, in which a group of the Count di Luna’s armored soldiers chase down, corner and gang-rape a bevy of prisoners (read “detainees”). Where was Michael Moore when we needed him?

Stephen Lawless’ production, never a thing of beauty for the eye, has at least been drastically bettered for the ear. The American soprano Sondra Radvanovsky – in her 30s and with some history in workshops here at UCLA and USC but only now coming into her own – has the ideal voice for the put-upon Verdi heroine. She has the dark throb that evokes the sounds of the magical past – of Leontyne, of Maria, of Zinka on her good nights, and their power to draw tears from a turn of phrase (most of all in the magical sequence of arias at the start of Act 4). Beyond all of that she also commands, or did on opening night, an ease of coloratura only sporadically vouchsafed to those goddesses of the past; she is, in other words, a Find.

That was enough to elevate the Trovatore this time around over the previous run, drab scenery, pseudo-symbolic staging
and all. But there was also more: the dazzling, headlong Azucena of Dolora Zajick, without whose firebrand tonsils no company should consider producing this opera nowadays. There was the decent Manrico of Franco Farina, clean and spirited and blessedly free of the tenorial self-indulgences that encrust the role. There was the workaday Count di Luna of Roberto Frontali and, in the pit, the leadership of Lawrence Foster: neither disgraceful,
neither memorable.

Above any of these varied pleasures, however, there was one truly memorable event when sight and sound did come together. It happened during what is my favorite moment in the opera, when Verdi spins a sublime counterpoint out of the mutterings of the foiled Count on one part of the stage, his soldiers echoing his frustrations over on the other and, in between but offstage, a chorus of nuns singing of matters celestial. At this juncture, by accident or design, the panels of Benoît Dugardyn’s ugly stage separated to create a visual triptych that exactly mirrored the music. One moment here, the next moment gone, but it’s what I remember most from the whole up-and-down evening.

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Last week’s Master Chorale concert at Disney offered fair evidence of Grant Gershon’s enterprise in building his ensemble into a significant part of our musical life, offering concerts for the thinking listener as well as the pleasure-seeking. This program was decidedly aimed at the former: Only a small portion of the chorus was involved; seekers after the thunderous Alleluia were doomed to disillusion. Three major works, historically as well as musically important, made up the program; they spanned some 900 chronological years and yet bore strong relationships across that time span.

Much is made in your Music 101 of the Pérotin Viderunt Omnes as the music in which counterpoint was invented (in the 12th century), and of Palestrina’s Pope Marcellus Mass as the music in which counterpoint was rescued (in the 16th). That’s rather pat, of course, although the survival strengths of both works do provide valuable samplings of their time – if not, of course, of their respective place, which was something other than an acoustically excellent concert hall. The smooth, elegant, jig-time rhythms of the Master Chorale’s take on Pérotin might surely have offended the pious Magister of Notre Dame, but possibly tickled the good scholar who reported on such matters (and whose non-name survives as Anonymous Four). Of the Palestrina Mass, the legend – counterpoint on the brink of churchly condemnation, Palestrina’s pretty music saving the day – is the stuff of greater romance, and has been turned into at least one actual opera (by Pfitzner, and don’t ask). The problem here is that the music is so harmonically correct and therefore bland that it becomes unlistenable. Give me Gesualdo and a few parallel fifths any day.

At the end there was the fresh air of our own time – fresh, bracing and swept along under clouds of gray in the Te Deum of Arvo Pärt. Not for him the exuberant jiggety-jog of Pérotin or the sweet welcomings of Palestrina; if anything, the dark elegies on Pärt’s bleak landscape seem to extend back to the start of time. With small groups of singers spread through the hall, his music seems to define space – not as Berlioz will with his massive forces in the Requiem, but in small points of sound echoing across emptiness. On tape there were other sounds, gusts of winds recorded on the Norway coast. The harmonies clash; at a distance their mingling resembles a favorite Pärt sound, the ringing of bells. This is music from 1984, revised in 1992; it seems at once the newest music on the program and the oldest.

One aspect of Arvo Pärt’s music I value most highly is his ability to outline space with the most modest means: a few

performing groups, or simply solos widely spaced, or a few musicians performing together but in harmonies marvelously spaced. Composers are not always so successful. Liza Lim’s Ecstatic Architecture, which Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic performed last week, was commissioned as part of the orchestra’s “Building Music” festival now going on. It purports, or so the Australian composer would have us believe, to celebrate the hall and its architect. On the stage is a kind of design concept: cellos down front, horns off to the sides, brass with woodwind mouthpieces, ecstatic – no, I mean exotic – percussion, all setting up a momentous racket for 25 minutes. Whether the result is more Disney Hall than, say, Grand Central Station I am not enough of an architect to say. I have liked some of Lim’s music, including The Heart’s Ear, a chamber piece at a recent Green Umbrella concert, but this piece, at least on first hearing, I found most unattractive and also – when matched against her pre-concert
statements, which smacked of flack-talk at its most arrogant –
something of a leg-pull. At my advanced age, I prefer my legs under me.

Spain’s music is the art of the soloist, and Jordi Savall’s old instruments sing it well. He brought some of this music to the Getty Center two weekends ago with his ensemble, Hespérion “I, and it was a fine occasion. The Getty’s Harold M. Williams Auditorium is a utilitarian sort of room that doesn’t inspire artistic thoughts by itself, but in another part of the museum there was an exhibition of Spanish drawings and prints from about the same era

as the music, from the 1500s to the time of Goya. This, too, was mostly single-line work, elegant designs surrounded by a lot of space; if you kept the artwork in mind while listening to the music, it all came together.

The ensemble, which hails from Barcelona, has changed personnel over the years under its leaders – Savall, who draws magic from his viola da gamba, and his wife, Montserrat Figueras, whose deep, plangent contralto is the exact equivalent of her husband’s instrument, a sound that makes strong men weak. Their kids Arianna and Ferran were along this time to make this a family affair; they sing and play many instruments. The percussionist Pedro Estevan may be a family “outsider,” except that his playing – even on things as simple as a couple of sticks – becomes a blood relative of everybody else’s work. Every time I see the group perform, there’s a kind of dissolve between the audible and the visual. That happened this time, too, even within the bare walls of the room at the Getty.

The program was an interesting grab bag. Some of the most significant early Spanish music comes from the outer edges: the Sephardic songs the Jewish exiles then carried to other countries, and the Catalán songs in their fierce, defiant, separatist language. Much of the music the group performed exists merely as outlines calling for improvisations. All of this the Hespérion people handled wonderfully well, and they threw in some contemporary improv that didn’t at all break the style. Everything they perform – at this concert and on their own Alia Vox record label, which Harmonia Mundi distributes – has this marvelous sense of sounding very old and brand-new simultaneously. Daughter Arianna found notes of her own devising to sing a love poem redolent with ancient symbolism. Son Ferran, the latest addition to the group, sang a high-flying improv in an appealing, reedy tenor. But the sound memory that I summon up, a week later, embodies the loving obsessions of the instrumental partners repeating a simple chaconne bass by Tarquinio Merula while the voice of Montserrat Figueras floated like a royal purple robe above it all in a continuous melodic exaltation. During such moments you ask yourself whether music can get any better, and the answer has to be: No.

Both L.A. Opera’s final seasonal offerings are set in a storybook, operatic Spain, and Figaro‘s marriage ceremony actually includes a Mozartian fandango, if a rather stately one. The new Marriage of Figaro, which opened last weekend, is the production of Ian Judge, after four times around for the respectable Sir Peter Hall version; it is splendidly sung, tidily conducted by Stefan Anton Reck in his local debut, but burdened with visuals that range from inexplicable to hideous.

In the former category is a design sense – both in Tim Goodchild’s generally dismal sets and in the strangely unfocused costumes of Deirdre Clancy – that seems to lie across several centuries at once. During “Porgi amor,” her haunting aria of loneliness, Countess Almaviva is obliged to recline in her Louis XV bedroom swilling wine from a new-looking bottle and chatting into a white bedside telephone (to whom? Susanna? A previous scene had shown an old-fashioned annunciator system in working order). The disguised lovers in the final scene prowl the palace gardens in 18th-century ball gowns and military costumes while equipped with modern-day flashlights. The business of keys, crucial to the action in the second act, is carelessly managed; a door ostensibly locked one moment yields to the touch the next.

This I find intrusive and, if you’ll pardon the expression, borderline insane. It goes against what is otherwise a sublime musical performance, most of all by the Susanna and Figaro of Isabel Bayrakdarian and Erwin Schrott, both recent winners of Plácido Domingo’s “Operalia” competitions and both singing actors of taste, intelligence and a marvelous command of the Mozartian line. For Ms. Bayrakdarian’s spinning of the radiant, silver, stardust-encrusted thread of her “Deh vieni” aria in the last act, with disarming stage presence to complement, no appropriate critical terms are yet known to me. As the battling Almavivas, Darina Takova and David Pittsinger were considerably above okay, while a lithe mezzo named Sandra Piques Eddy, also new to the company, created a scene-stealing Cherubino of pure adolescent testosterone.

And then there’s Merlin, which is also Spanish but no way soloistic. Are you ready to accept the news that the same Isaac Albéniz who composed all those virtuosic piano pieces and Spanish dances also entertained the notion of creating an operatic trilogy on the legends of King Arthur – in English – and actually got all the way through the first part?

Albéniz completed Merlin in 1902, immediately set out on Lancelot, dropped it halfway and left Guinevere untouched. The texts were by an eccentric Brit named Francis Burdett Money-Coutts, who had also become Albéniz’s patron; they are in a highfalutin synthetic Olde English beside which Tolkien reads like this morning’s Times. Merlin deals with Arthur’s arrival and marriage to Guinevere (a mute dancer) and the old wizard’s overthrow at the hands of Morgan le Fay. On a BBC/Opus Arte DVD of a 2003 production from Madrid’s Teatro Real, in a revised and apparently cleaned-up orchestration by José de Eusebio, the opera’s three acts run close to an hour apiece, not far behind Parsifal – which it somewhat resembles in, say, a John Williams rewrite.

Of the Albéniz we know and love there isn’t a smidge – until, that is, late in the third act, when Morgan and her gnomes start planning their sinister derring-do, the orchestra breaks out in something close to a seguidilla, and finally – too late – we’re back in Albéniz country. Too late, alas, also applies to major cast members: veteran Brünnhilde Eva Marton as Morgan le Fay and Carol Vaness as her accomplice Nivian, both of whom have sung on better days. The performance is identified as the world premiere of the Eusebio orchestration, and gets a snazzy production at Madrid’s opera house, full of fancy lighting effects and a lit-up Excalibur straight out of Star Wars. Merlin is exactly the right opera for the collector who thinks he already has everything but longs to be contradicted.

The Goldbergs on a 9-foot concert grand at Disney; Hildegard von Bingen among the Presbyterians in Pasadena: What price authenticity now?

Actually, the term is a land mine, and has always been. I have lived through three kinds of Goldberg Variations performances. Wanda Landowska played on her giant, clangorous harpsichord – grossly mannered, rhythmically distorted, swaddled in an aura that suggested that nobody out front dare stir. Glenn Gould stopped halfway through his acrobatic romp, had a drink and asked that somebody shut a balcony door. András Schiff at Disney last week delivered the work in a spellbinding single breath. Rather than “authentic,” I would regard each of these, and the perhaps half a hundred other versions I have encountered of Bach’s sublime exploration of the inmost implications of his supple small saraband tune, as a ritual in the best sense.

There is one aspect of “authenticity” that must remain constant, however, which Schiff’s performance did honor, and that is the matter of overall proportion. Bach specifies that each section of each variation be repeated, and the high art of his complex working-out demands no less. Schiff’s performance ran almost exactly 80 minutes, as does his recent ECM recording. Recordings pre-CD, understandably, omit some or all repeats, leaving architecturally distorted versions. You may think this a trivial matter, but I invite you to figure out the incredible chromatic harmonies of Variation 25 on a single hearing. Bach knew what he was doing, and so did András Schiff; this was a vivid, exuberant performance. Its authenticity was in its recapturing of the creative impulse that set the music onto paper in the first place.

I don’t want to get into the was-there-or-wasn’t-there Hildegard business again; the music that Anonymous 4 sang for the Da Camera Society at Pasadena’s huge, handsome Westminster Presbyterian sounded like what we know about 11th- and 12th-century music, and the texts were like the writings of the mysterious Hildegard, who was resanctified as a crossover heroine a few years ago. The four women of Anonymous 4 (their name from an authentic and important medieval scribe) are about to disband and go their separate ways into various musical projects – films, children’s programs, research. They leave behind glowing pages. The group came together to explore old music that could be sung by more or less equal voices (rather than tenors, baritones and basses) and found a thrilling repertory. They invented a singing style not dusty-authentic but faithful to the spirit, which is different. Their latest disc (American Angels, on Harmonia Mundi) brings their wonderful energy to early American hymns, and it’s already high on the charts, as it should be.

Southwest Chamber Music, which had for some time offered a curious mix of enterprising programming and substandard performance, reconstituted itself a few months ago with a number of personnel changes, and a recent concert at Zipper Hall was an encouraging result. Morton Subtonick’s Release was the major new work – his last composition, he claims, which nobody is prepared to believe. It is, in any case, a big work, dense and at times appealingly romantic. It’s set in several sections, for quartet – the instrumentation of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time – and computer electronics, which send the sound into motion. The clarinet is particularly important – autobiographical, says Subotnick, who once played that instrument. The one thing it doesn’t sound like is a last work.

Luciano Berio’s marvelous Naturale began the program – viola (Jan Karlin) and percussion (Lynn Vartan) interwoven with tape of a Sicilian folksinger – one of those extraordinary demonstrations of that composer’s deep love of the infinite treasures of the human voice. Midway came an endearing curiosity: Samuel Beckett’s radio play Cascando, for which William Kraft had written some dabs of music, and with the play itself (also pretty much dabs) spoken by John Schneider and Martin Perlich. Say what you will, those Southwests do come up with things.

Two other chamber concerts offered brave repertory from the same years a continent apart. The imaginative Jacaranda series filled Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church with a nice pairing of early Ravel and Stravinsky, music wound around with tendrils of art nouveau. From both composers there were fragrant, willowy song cycles: Ravel’s to poems of Mallarmé, Stravinsky’s to bits of Japanoiserie composed later in the year of The Rite of Spring. Both called for ensembles of winds and strings, and so to start things off there could be Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro for harp and those instruments. Susan Kane was the singer, Maria Casale the harpist; the young, splendid ensemble included the Denali Quartet. Blessings on them all, and on the planners of this exceptionally tasteful, worthwhile series that has one more program this season, on June 20.

At Zipper, before far too small a crowd, the area’s single celebration of Charles Ives (50 years dead May 19) consisted of an offering by members of the Armadillo Quartet plus guest: a single well-packed program including both string quartets, five songs and a miscellany. Within the limitations of four players, the music proved adequately rambunctious to suggest its ornery composer: the First Quartet from the Yalie days that loses its manners now and then and sideslips into the middle of next week, an intermezzo from The Celestial Country that manages to thumb its nose at its own treacly ooze. Juliana Gondek was on hand to sing five songs, their piano parts arranged for strings by Barry Socher, ending with the rowdy patriotic send-up “He Is There!” After intermission came the Second Quartet, arguably one of the good works, and, at the end, the weird, polytonal convolutions of the “Washington’s Birthday” movement from the Holidays Symphony boiled down successfully for quartet but leaving unanswered the usual Ives question: Dabbler or genius?

To LACMA came MOSAIC, yet another

New York–based new-music group and, apparently, an adventurous one. Tania León’s Azulejos had its world premiere; I love her tense, flavorsome music (some of which Dawn Upshaw has recorded), but this piece was too short to judge. There was George Crumb to make amends: seven huge chunks from his 1973 Makrokosmos to bring me back to the excitement of first hearing this stupendous stuff for amplified piano-plus and to wonder why nobody plays him anymore. There was a manic touch in MOSAIC’s Emma Tahmizian’s performance, which was just right. Rand Steiger’s dark, eloquent 1989 In Memoriam began the program; Steve Mackey’s 2001 Heavy/Light ended it with Mackey on electric guitar: smart-ass New York stuff by a composer who once seemed to be going somewhere. I did like the tennis balls dropped on the bass drum, however; that’s
real orchestration.

Photo by Betty Freeman

“Cherish the hybrids,” Lou Harrison used to say, and say again, as a kind of mantra. “They’re all we’ve got.” Two big works, 33 years apart in the infinite variety of his legacy, were on hand last week, each a different kind of mix and, as it happened, each a different kind of marvel. What they shared were those cherishable qualities we are only now coming to discover about Harrison’s music, its beauty and its strength.

That latter quality in particular eludes some listeners. Harrison never concealed his fondness for writing pretty music, and some of it, to be sure, simply melts in your ear. The final moments of The Perilous Chapel, which the USC Thornton Contemporary Music Ensemble performed at last week’s Green Umbrella concert, fades out in a haze of pure diatonic velvet for which no better word than pretty will suffice. But the music in context, as the resolution to previous barbarous goings-on – all scored for soft-spoken ensemble of harp, flute, cello and small drum, and therefore sounding off in the distance like a bunch of garrulous toys – is exactly the proper sweet resolution.

That music dates from 1948. Harrison was in New York; his circle included Virgil Thomson and John Cage, and he had made a name for himself editing and performing the Third Symphony of Charles Ives and guiding it toward recognition 40 years overdue. Some of that work’s naive and folkish melodic style rubs off on the young (31) Harrison’s work, but the sound of this early piece, the wonderful “open” scoring of those solo instruments, points unmistakably ahead to the fascination with matters exotic and otherworldly that would seize his imagination many years later.

The Double Concerto for Violin, Cello and Javanese Gamelan dates from 1981 and reveals that fascination in full flower. Harrison had by then journeyed around the Pacific Rim and absorbed the languages of its musics until he could make those languages his own. He then set himself up in California as a missionary, teaching college kids fresh off the beach how to compose in the tuning systems of Bali and Java, how to build and tune their own gongs and drums and form their own gamelans, and yet – this is important – how to merge these sounds and these harmonic systems into their own Western melodic and rhythmic instincts. Cherish the hybrids, he taught, and become them. His own music led the way.

This Double Concerto, which concluded a splendid XTET program at LACMA in a burst of glory, with Susan Jensen and Roger Lebow as soloists and Bill Alves’ Harvey Mudd American Gamelan from the Claremont Colleges, is pure mongrel, and wonderful of its kind. The background is, of course, the rich, subtle sounds of the excellent small gamelan – and that’s already a sight, five very undergrad-looking kids whomping away at the devices from a culture half a world and half a millennium away. Against this the solo instruments play an almost continual rhapsodic line that seems to have both shape and no shape at all. There is other music like this: some of Terry Riley’s long works for the Kronos, but there the melodic impetus seems more Celtic than Pacific.

It’s probably pointless, however, to seek out resemblances; there are just so many notes in the world, after all. What has happened here – and it is more delightful than anything else – is that Harrison has accomplished an overlay of Western concerto principles onto this alien foundation, made it adhere in some strange and cockeyed way, and turned out something close to a masterpiece. The exhilarating Double Concerto is just that. It’s easy to make the distinction in dealing with new music, as I wrote for another magazine in 1987 and do so again, that diatonic harmonies plus tunes equals conservative and that abstruse harmonies plus bristling melodic lines equals progressive. But those equations break down constantly in the real world, and they do with Lou Harrison.

Donald Crockett conducted both the USC ensemble and XTET Harrison performances; if that establishes him as the local authority on that composer, so much to the good. Also on the USC program – planned as a celebration of Pacific Rim music – was a work by Australia’s Liza Lim, whose Ecstatic Architecture, commissioned by the Philharmonic, comes up later this month at Disney Hall’s Building Music Festival. The Heart’s Ear, based on the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi, a 10-minute-or-so piece of attractive floating adrift in a just-intonation tuning system, finished too soon after its start. It does make her next piece worth the expectation. At the end came AC/DC by Vietnam’s P.Q. Phan, which on one hearing seemed like a lot of aimless noise. Mr. Phan, says a program note, is “currently composing music which integrates the musical aesthetics of Southeast Asia and the West.” Plus ça change . . .

The XTET program boasted an all-star list: Luciano Berio (his O King), Morton Feldman’s second The Viola in My Life and Olivier Messiaen’s Pièce for piano quartet, along with the Harrison. Feldman’s Viola pieces are too seldom done; their reputation probably suffers from their composer’s reputation for diffuseness, which is unfair because these pieces go somewhere – and beautifully. At LACMA, Kazi Pitelka’s viola seemed to fill the stage with little points of light, greeted and echoed by the soft “pings” from David Johnson’s percussion on one side of the stage and Vicki Ray’s celesta on the other. Magical.

Messiaen’s Pièce for piano and strings was his musical farewell, written a year before his death. Surprise seemed to dominate the intermission conversation, that this master of the transcendental panorama had gone off so tersely, yet this four-minute piece seemed loaded with explosive power, full of twists and turns that, if left to their own devices, might easily go off. Daisietta Kim, too seldom on our stages, sang Luciano Berio’s harrowing lament on the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in the version consisting of nothing but the syllables of his name sung shudderingly against musical dots from a small ensemble – the version that Berio later expanded for his Sinfonia. Here is music that says exactly what it means, no more and no less. Composers tempted to add extra measures to whatever they may be

working on are urged to study this work and take heed.

In three concerts over eight days, the excellent Penderecki String Quartet – visitors from Canada despite their chosen namesake – re-created the life span of one of the past century’s giants: Béla Bartók, through his six quartets. Though he never acknowledged them as such, these remarkable works stand forth as the autobiography of his most productive years. With remarkable sureness of musical resource from the outset, they begin a tale of an eager, observant young man, surrounded by the infinite variety of the musical world circa 1908 and willing to absorb some of everything. They carry the line forward three decades to a man of deep sadness and physical pain, as shadows close in around that world. Is there a more profound leave-taking in all music than the descent into darkness by the solo cello at the end of the last of these quartets?

As with Beethoven – some of whose chamber music formed a fitting companion to Bartók’s on these concerts – the quartets come closest to the composer himself, of all his works, in tracing his musical states of mind. The First does indeed move rather easily through European musical society. Ravel drops in, perhaps also Debussy; the shadow of late German Romanticism – Reger, say, or the young Schoenberg – looms not far off. The lyricism is rich and attractive, but there is little to hint at the extraordinary inventions of the later works – the stomping, jagged rhythms that intrude upon the serene landscape in the Second, the concision of power in the Third until you think the work is about to explode inside you, the nocturnal spooks that sweep across the Fourth like shadows from another planet. There are outcries in these works that perhaps tell us more about Bartók himself than we ought to know; my one encounter with him – backstage, at the premiere of his Concerto for Orchestra – left me with a memory of eyes of penetrating sorrow that, 60 years later, I would not erase if I could.

There are good recordings of these quartets – the Emerson, the Takács, the old Juilliard (which was the first and which blew everybody’s mind on LP around 1950) – yet the experience of hearing them surrounded by air, even in the lousy acoustics of LACMA’s Bing Theater, greatly enhanced the element of closeness to their composer that makes these works unique. Filling out the programs with late Beethoven was also exactly right: the Quartets Opp. 130 and 135, and they, too, were superbly played. Opus 130, however, presented the usual problem. Beethoven’s original plan was to follow the supremely beautiful Cavatina – a slow thread of endless melody best heard, as it surely was imagined, in a single breath – with a final fugue of staggering difficulty. From an emotional point of view, that would have been the proper balance. Beethoven, however, let himself be persuaded – probably by the ancestors of today’s “good music” radio programmers – to let up on his audiences, and so he plugged in a much lighter dingbat of a finale that really betrays everything that has come before, and published the Great Fugue separately. At LACMA, the Penderecki played Opus 130 Lite before Bartók No. 3, and the Great Fugue alone before Bartók No. 5. If I had been running the show, I’d have done the Great Fugue twice and dumped the dingbat altogether.

While Bartók was fashioning string quartets in Hungary, Carlos Chávez was throwing notes against a piece of paper in his native Mexico and calling it his Third Piano Sonata. Susan Svrcek’s Piano Spheres concert at Zipper Hall last week – the final event in this season’s series – included this work, and while I have heard some fairly aimless music in my time, this 1928 concoction in four movements took a kind of new prize for something that came out of nowhere, ended nowhere, and went nowhere in between. The program also included an interesting group of homages to Chopin by Chávez, Villa-Lobos and Schumann, some juvenile fluff by local composer Andrew Norman, and, at the end, a real knockout piece, Villa-Lobos’ Rudepoêma.

That work’s dates are 1921–26, and I can see where it would take that long just to get all the notes written down. Villa-Lobos was in Paris during most of that time, not his native Brazil, so this isn’t one of his nicely cultivated Bachianas pieces. Its sources are more primitive, the new passions for African chants and dances, drums and shouts – all boiled down to a virtuoso piano style that sounds like three performances of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz played simultaneously. It goes on and on, nearly half an hour’s worth of tail chasing and padding of various sorts, but it’s a damned exciting piece, and Susan Svrcek did indeed play the living hell out of it – without ever letting on why anyone would want to. The work was dedicated to Artur Rubinstein (before he became “Arthur”), and he wrestled with it early on. In later years, the only Villa-Lobos he ever played were the pretty little pieces about dolls and gardens.

The most beautiful performance I have heard in recent weeks – or months, or perhaps even years – was none of the above, however. It happened last week at Royce Hall, when the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra performed Bach’s Concerto for Violin and Oboe before a sold-out, cheering crowd, as if Callas and Caruso had suddenly come to town. Margaret Batjer and Allan Vogel, LACO’s first-desk players, were the soloists; Helmuth Rilling was the conductor of this all-Bach program that also included three cantatas with fine soloists and a cut-down contingent from the Master Chorale. The singing was okay, and the cantatas themselves were out of Bach’s top drawer, but it was that concerto and the joyous, deep conversation among the two instrumental soloists and the wonderful small orchestra that put the whole evening up on the topmost top shelf.

Can you remember the first time you heard that concerto? I can; it was at the Liberty Music Shop in Manhattan, in the days when small groups of music lovers gathered as new shipments of 78-rpm discs from abroad were tenderly unpacked and tenderly placed on the record player. There was a recording from Denmark, of a Bach concerto nobody had ever heard, with performers whose names nobody could pronounce. After the slow movement, with that sublime melody passed back and forth between soloists, with the orchestra simply strumming its approval, we all stood there in silence, with our jaws dropped. That was the kind of performance I heard again last week.

Photo by Friedrun Reinhold

If I tell you that my favorite disc of recent months contains over an hour’s worth of three-minute bursts of the same kind of music, seven centuries old and built on principles in no way related to anything else in our repertory experience, you may want to change stations . . . but wait! Know first that the disc is on ECM, one of the more trustworthy of surviving classical labels, and that the performers are the Hilliard Ensemble, that lively and questing group – countertenors, tenors, baritone – whose lust for stylistic exploration is apparently boundless. Here they sing a collection of motets by the 14th-century poet, philosopher, musician and churchman Guillaume de Machaut, music whose strange, distant beauty is much enhanced by the typical ECM treatment: haunting, softly echoey sound that bespeaks the cold stones of the small Austrian church that their microphones have re-sanctified, and the dark, mysterious distances of the photography in the accompanying booklet. There aren’t many class acts left in the recording industry; ECM, along with Nonesuch and Harmonia Mundi, bravely holds the fort.

The Machaut motet is a different concoction from the polyphonic motets of Palestrina and his Renaissance pals. It is a form built up in layers, sung simultaneously. The low voice (tenor, from tenere, to hold) sings a very short text, maybe just a couple of words, in long, sustained notes. A higher voice above him (motetus) sings a much faster melody, with words that relate to the tenor’s text. A third voice (triplum) sings faster still, with a third text again related to the other two. In the first Machaut motet in the ECM collection, the tenor‘s entire text is “I sigh”; the motetus begins “with sighing, suffering heart . . .” and the triplum has what amounts to a whole sermon on what to do when you fall in love. This all creates a hopeless jumble of text, of course, and you have to wonder whether Machaut or any of his numerous colleagues had any interest in having this music performed, or whether these pieces were more like philosophical designs set to music. Many of the motets have religious connotations; some will have a hymn of praise to the Virgin Mary in the lower voices, coupled with a fairly carnal encomium to the girl next door in the upper voice.

But then there’s the music. As I listened the other night, a friend asked if this was Arvo Pärt; he was off by 700 years, but right on as well. We cannot, of course, hear this music with 14th-century ears, but the weight of history can be a marvelous enablement for discovering a whole new level of freshness in this repertory. Is it so wrong to hear Arvo Pärt or Bartók or Charles Ives in the cross-relationships and false cadences in Machaut? It would be equally wrong to hear this music as any kind of primitive, to miss the high level of poetic daring in the textual or musical crossovers, the sheer beauty in the sinuous melodic lines.

Last week, an NPR music programmer told Talk of the Nation‘s Neal Conant that he uses these motets – along with Peruvian tribal chants and other assorted exotica – as “buttons” between news items on All Things Considered. Things being what they are in classical music these days, we take what we can get.

I wrote with some ecstasy a couple of weeks ago about Thomas Adès’ operatic setting of The Tempest, of which recordings are not available. Now there is more music by this remarkable young (33) Brit, and it is available, a collection of short works on EMI Classics, which comes with a “parental advisory” sticker on the cover for reasons not hard to discern. In 1999, the New York Philharmonic commissioned six composers to write “messages for the millennium” for performances on the eve of 2000, and Adès came up with the 16-minute America: A Prophecy, which heads this new disc and gives it its title. For his text and his theme, he chose to look not ahead but back, to the stable Mayan civilization of half a millennium before, and its destruction by conquerors and looters from abroad. He drew upon ancient writings (including La Guerra by the 16th-century Mateo Flecha) and on later texts sympathetic to the fate of the Mayans. “O my nation, prepare,” sings a mezzo-soprano in a twisted line resonant with ancient sounds, her voice rising out of an opening orchestral bombardment full of terrified shrieks and tongues of flame. “The people move as in dreams! They are weak from fuck and drink . . .” She sings of invaders from the east, who destroy and burn. “They will come from the east,” the chorus sings. “They will burn all the sky.” “Ash feels no pain,” responds the soloist. All this was performed in New York, 22 months before 9/11. Was nobody listening?

I don’t know whether circumstances will allow this work the circulation it deserves; hearing it on disc, long after the facts it uncannily portends, still has its dark overtones. That has to do mostly with the writing for the solo mezzo (Susan Bickley on the disc), which is pained and intense. But that matter aside (if possible), this is music of tremendous power. Percussion predominates; the sounds wrench and pound. The composer conducts the City of Birmingham Orchestra and Chorus.

An interesting variorum of short works, mostly of slight stature, fills out the disc and draws a nice picture of a composer of admirable curiosity at his cluttered desk, busily trying things out: a bit of Omar Khayyam, a wise line or two from John Donne, a snatch of Tennessee Williams erotica, a Couperin harpsichord number ingeniously transcribed for chamber ensemble, Cardiac Arrest (the rock number that showed up at a Green Umbrella not long ago) and, finally, Brahms. This is a tiny, hilarious poem by, of all people, pianist and sometime Brahms interpreter Alfred Brendel. It’s all about that composer’s very worst side. “This wading through chords and double octaves wakes even the children from their deep sleep,” proclaims the text. “‘Not Brahms again!’ they wail.” And Adès, with his fine parodistic sense, and with the help of a ponderous (i.e., Brahmsian) baritone named Christopher Maltman, has done for Brahms exactly what we have all longed to have befall him all these interminable years.

On Tuesday of last week, and again on Friday, Alfred Brendel – current patron saint of thinking piano aficionados – played music by the usual dead Viennese (Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert) in the usual concert garb (white tie, tails) to the usual sold-out house at Disney Hall. On Thursday, on the same stage, Lang Lang, current superwhiz idol to a whole ‘nother variety of piano fanciers, wooed another sold-out house with another kind of music – the Rachmaninoff “Full Moon and Empty Arms” Second Piano Concerto – which he performed in a Chinese shirt of fetching fuchsia. And while you would have thought that the audience for Lang Lang’s performance might have torn the place apart during his performance, and especially between movements of the concerto, to inform him of their approving presence, quite the opposite took place: His taut, surprisingly well-controlled performance kept the crowd in check until the final note had skyrocketed through the hall, whereupon, of course, chaos descended. (The encore – surprise! – was not the expected trapeze act, but Schumann’s quiet Träumerei, quietly played.) By contrast, the sadly misinformed audience for Brendel’s Friday program, which he shared with his son, Adrian, in a program of Beethoven cello sonatas, took it upon themselves to applaud after every movement. You just never know.

Brendel has been a generous presence these past few weeks: an eloquent shaping force with Matthias Goerne in the Winterreise I wrote about last week, a fine soloist (with David Zinman and the Philharmonic) in Beethoven’s C-minor Concerto, a solo recitalist and, finally, the duo program with his son. This last event was disappointing for other reasons than the audience’s behavior; Adrian seems a proficient rather than an expressive musician – not ready for prime time, as a friend aptly put it. But the Beethoven cello sonatas somewhat favor the piano anyhow, and even though memories of my old Emanuel Feuermann–Myra Hess recording of the A-major kept flooding back upon me, it was the beautiful points made along the way by the elder Brendel that were most worth carrying home afterward.

The solo recital (wherein the audience behaved itself admirably) abounded in such points. The first half was all early Mozart – those sonatas in the Köchel 200 that nobody takes seriously enough, that are easy to play through at home but then round corners into astonishing harmonic turns that catch us up short. Brendel played two of these, as big, serious music, and that was a revelation. He began with more unfamiliar Mozart, a C-minor Fantasia (K. 396, not the more famous K. 475) and revealed a remarkable, forward-looking piece of large-scale sonata-form structure that, once again, is worth anyone’s study. Brendel then went on to the marvelous, late Klavierstücke of Schubert, prophetic works from his last year in which foreshadowings of Schumann and Brahms are uncannily present, and ended with Beethoven’s Opus 109 Sonata. The memory I most happily cherish was Brendel’s shaping of light and shade as Beethoven’s achingly beautiful final tune re-emerges from clouds and refreshes itself whole in the final measures. For this one can forgive the Missa Solemnis.

Richard Goode is another of our distinguished, white-haired piano eminences, and his recent Royce Hall recital drew a large crowd. Schumann’s Davidsbündler Dances, which bulked large on the program, were handsomely and imaginatively played, but they do try the patience: 18 short pieces in pretty much the same language, alternately brave and droopy, with no sense of why we have gone from No. 13, say, to No. 14. The evening’s great work was Janácek’s two-movement Sonata October 1, 1905, serious, bitter celebration of a revolutionary event in the composer’s native Brno. With Mozart’s stark A-minor Sonata at the start and Chopin’s G-minor Ballade at the end, the program did somewhat lean toward the somber; perhaps the Schumann was needed, after all.

Not much in music is as stark, however, or as somber, as the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich, which we have had here twice in recent weeks. Shostakovich wrote the work in shock upon his first visit to war-ravaged Dresden in 1960, when the effects of the Allied bombing were still to be seen. With all the jabberwocky (true or false) written about inner meanings and autobiographical contents of this or that work, the “secrets” of this quartet are fairly clear. Its musical motto is the composer’s own musical signature: D-S-C-H (with the “S” standing for the German E flat, the “H” for B). The quartet has had a second life in Rudolf Barshai’s transcription as the Chamber Symphony, and it is equally compelling that way.

Either way, it tears you apart. At the Philharmonic, played by orchestra members, it served as pre-concert entertainment to David Zinman’s performance of that composer’s Eighth Symphony, an obscene juxtaposition if ever one was. (Alfred Brendel’s performance of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto came between the two to soften the blow.) From this hourlong collection of spare parts, assembled by Shostakovich as World War II wound down, I get nothing: no sense of coherence, nothing from the kicky scherzoid moments that hadn’t been better expressed in earlier, shapelier works, no power from the affected oratory of the slow movements. “If there’s a theme here it escapes these ears,” writes program annotator Herbert Glass of one particularly sticky moment. If there is music here it escapes these.

At UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall, the Eighth Quartet served to conclude a dazzling evening by the St. Lawrence String Quartet, the new ensemble out of Canada that has become the darling of the chamber-music world. Everybody loves them for the sheen of their performance style, and the way they have of playing straight out to the crowd: something like the Lang Lang approach, except that they play better music. At Schoenberg they gave an edge-of-the-seat performance of the Shostakovich; before that they played the Ravel Quartet with such elegance, such purity, that it seemed to hang suspended. Before that they played Osvaldo Golijov. Their best-selling disc (on EMI/Angel) has the Golijov pan-national repertory: the phenomenal Yiddishbbuk inspired by inscriptions from Prague ghetto walls, the klezmer-inspired Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (with clarinet), and his Last Round, which the Philharmonic has done here orchestrally. At Schoenberg the St. Lawrence played just the Yiddishbbuk, haunting and exhilarating. Get the disc, and be prepared to dance on the ceiling.

Matthias Goerne, who has spent some quality time with us at Disney Hall over the past two weeks, is a transfixing musical presence. As dramatic baritones go, he is at 37 barely dry behind the ears, but he has already taken his place in a distinguished dynasty. In my time that dynasty has included such names as Friedrich Schorr, Hans Hotter and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau; their musical line extends from the role of Jesus in the two Bach Passions, Mozart’s Count Almaviva and Papageno, Schubert’s song cycles, Wagner’s Wotan and, of more recent vintage, Berg’s Wozzeck: noble palaces built for noble inhabitants. Goerne came to us first in 1998, in a remarkable recital of music that he has widely championed, the biting satire mingled with personal pain of Hanns Eisler’s Hollywood Songbook, mostly to the words of Bertolt Brecht, high art carved out of monumental venom by two of our most ungrateful refugees.

On this visit Goerne came with even higher artistic goods, two days apart. First there was an hour’s worth of Mahler’s Wunderhorn songs with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic – a glorious assemblage from Romanticism’s final sputter, a companion-in-kind to the nose-thumbing Shostakovich Ninth, which shared the program – and Schubert’s Winterreise with pianist Alfred Brendel. Those two offerings, along with the memory of the Eisler program (available on Decca at one time, although you never know anymore), make an interesting sequence: tense, human portraits, their sporadic flashes of humor nearly always defeated at reality’s doorstep. Might not the starving child of Mahler’s “Das Irdische Leben” be equally at home amid the howling dogs of Schubert’s nameless village, or abandoned in one of Eisler’s garbage-strewn alleys?

We associate Winterreise with dark voices. The tragedy in the poetry, and the resonances that fill the silences in Schubert’s harrowing music, make this an automatic reaction. Most of Schubert’s singers, however, were tenors; baritones and basses must sing his music transposed from their original keys; so much for “authenticity.” The real difference comes with piano sonority; transposed down to lower keys, the sound necessarily thickens. The special quality of Goerne’s collaboration with Brendel last Monday was the balance, the lightness of the piano, even in lower tonalities, against the outgoing drama in Goerne’s singing. Comparing his performance at Disney Hall with his 1996 recording with Graham Johnson, part of Hyperion’s encyclopedic Schubert collection – as I was inspired to do later that night – you hear pretty much what you expect to hear. That, too, is an intensely moving performance by a 30-year-old singer fully aware of the richness and beauty of his voice, not yet fully confident about using its full power, but already fully responsive to the human tragedy of poet Wilhelm Müller’s irony-beset misanthrope. The growth of Goerne’s power between that recording and his performance last week is reason enough to welcome his presence – and his future – as one of the great singing artists of our time.

The late Pauline Kael, who, you might as well know, was my favorite critic in all the arts, coined one of the phrases that I live by, the notion that an observer might conceivably “admire but not like” a work of art. Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, which the Master Chorale inflicted upon a large and apparently ecstatic audience at Disney Hall last week, heads my “admire but not like” list and, I think, always has. There are no extenuating explanations for my dislike of the work. Beethoven had not run out of steam; there are the five late string quartets to prove that, full of original and beautiful ideas, and fugues – great, hair-raising fugues that challenge the imagination even now. The Missa Solemnis, on the other foot, is full of truly dreadful fugues, stuff that even Handel wouldn’t have handled.

Aware throughout his life of the value of a fast buck, Beethoven turned out plenty of potboilers that his most fervent proponents try to stay away from in order to preserve his reputation – a piano sonata here, a violin sonata there, an overture, some variations, even a couple of big choral numbers. (Heard Das Glorreiche Augenblick lately?) But a 90-minute Solemn Mass, dating from those last prodigious years of the Ninth Symphony and all those other good works – with a media premiere in the offing and with archdukes and archbishops waiting in the wings, and with trumpets and drums at the end heralding the cause of Peace on Earth – was something the world could not ignore in those halcyon days of post-Napoleonic bliss. “From the heart to the heart” Beethoven had penned on his manuscript, and this seemed enough to obliterate notice of those limping melodic lines, those Amen choruses with textures like wet paper towels, and with fugues that, like the proverbial snake, persisted in swallowing their own tails.

Grant Gershon led his 100-member chorus and a fair-sized orchestra in a decent approximation of the music, for what it was. The vocal quartet – Elissa Johnston, Paula Rasmussen, Stanford Olsen and Ron Li-Paz – did wander off pitch in their solo section of the “Sanctus,” but that might have been out of exasperation with what had come just before. Beethoven being Beethoven, and supporting audiences for choral organizations tending toward rather churchly tastes, it’s probably inevitable that the Missa Solemnis makes its turgid way into the schedule every decade or so. If you find yourself leaving the next performance surprisingly unsatisfied for reasons you can’t quite explain, take it as a sign of growing up.

Thanks to friends in medium-high places,
I have come by a video of The Tempest, Thomas Adès’ new opera produced by London’s Royal Opera and broadcast by the BBC in mid-February, and it is a work of extraordinary beauty. Meredith Oakes wrote the text, freely and imaginatively built from Shakespeare’s outlines; Adès himself conducted the marvelous performance, with Simon Keenlyside as the Prospero and an amazing coloratura soprano, Cyndia Seaden, as an Ariel who is truly a creature of light and air. The music is like nothing of Adès I have previously heard; it has a soft luster that seems at times both old and new; at moments of particular poetic elegance it moves with a gentle syncopation called hemiola that Henry Purcell also used most eloquently. A final ensemble, set in that rhythm, leaves you dizzy with delight. When may we have it here, please?