So I've Heard

Photo by Diane Alancraig

Two events on last week’s crowded calendar, with music created eons apart, came agreeably close to whatever it is that people can define as “perfection.” One was Gloria Cheng’s piano concert in Santa Monica on Saturday, especially in extended works by Olivier Messiaen and John Adams; the other came a night later at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall, with Gary Gray as soloist in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Vastly different kinds of music these, written under vastly different circumstances, yet I find a similar urgency – call it hypnosis and you won’t go too far astray – in the strength of Mozart’s lyricism and the motive power in the unfolding of two ‘prentice works from these unalike French and American figures of our own time.

We rack our own expressive resources, and have now for centuries, seeking the words to explain the shivers as the simplest Mozart tune unfolds – the slow movement of this Clarinet Concerto, for one. An arpeggio moves upward, then down, then up again but with a few extra notes to darken the harmony: That’s all there is, the same as there is nothing but water and sunlight to a rainbow. The wonder of Mozart – here, and in the galaxy of similar unimposing tunes and astonishing harmonic devices that can trouble our sleep in the remembrance (the Countess’ “Porgi, amor” in Figaro, the Wind Serenade invoked in the one sane moment in Amadeus) – is the sublime exactitude with which these exquisitely fashioned small ideas fill their space. And it is that ability to fill their space that sets the works of the classical language apart from anything else in music, no matter how eloquently (and convincingly) one might argue for the place of this or that contemporary language alongside the dead masters.

But I digress. Cheng’s concert was part of the new and charmingly chosen “Jacaranda” series at Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian, with benches that make you sit upright and music that makes it worth the effort. Messiaen’s Eight Préludes, from 1929, shows us a young and ardent composer under Debussy’s spell and trying out the extreme ends of his palette, with enchanting sounds that would stay with him in later, surer works but with an earnestness that already bears his own signature. Cheng has performed and recorded a lot of Messiaen; she wears his colors well. Her command of color also ennobles her concept of Adams’ Phrygian Gates, which becomes, with her, a marvelous ebb-and-flow that transcends the “pure” minimalist patterning and assumes its important position as the ancestor of much of Adams’ later mastery. The plan of the work, the interplay of modalities and modulations as set forth in Adams’ intricate program notes, is important in itself; in every succeeding performance from Cheng – I have heard several, plus her two recordings – I become more aware of the dramatic instincts that motivate the piece and make its final moments both devastating and thrilling.

Cheng is one of our local heroes; as is Vicki Ray, whose Piano Spheres concert earlier this month was, as usual, full of high spirits and adventure, and who turned up again at LACMA as the spark plug at last week’s Xtet concert; as is Jeffrey Kahane. The L.A. Chamber Orchestra concert included the aforementioned Clarinet Concerto, a Bach concerto with Kahane conducting from the keyboard and a pair of Vivaldi double concertos – two cellos, two oboes – with orchestra first-desk players as soloists. Under Kahane the orchestra flourishes; the programs are lively and so is his leadership. As you might expect, he is being nibbled at by other bigtime orchestras, including, I am told, the Denver; orchestral bigamy is all the rage these days. Before the concert he lectured and demonstrated, charmingly and intelligently, on the differences between harpsichord and piano. The Vivaldi soloists included the orchestra’s first oboist Allan Vogel, who is as fine an exponent of that treacherous instrument as exists anywhere in the land today. The program also included a weak-tea bit by one David Matthews, an Introit for strings, and a final peal of trumpets composed for Gloucester Cathedral, where it might have done well to remain.

At LACMA there was another excellent Xtet program, providing further expansion to the current Shostakovich glut and the chance to revisit some early Aaron Copland too often neglected, the Sextet for Piano, Clarinet and Strings. This was Copland’s reworking, wisely undertaken, of his 1933 Short Symphony, music from which both the intrepid Serge Koussevitzky and Leopold Stokowski had backed away on the matter of rhythmic complexity (and which the no-less-intrepid MTT of SFO has recorded with the ease of a knife through butter). It’s a great piece of sassy, jazzy, in-your-face Copland, but it belongs in the hands of chamber players – the kind of handle-anything studio musicians who make up groups like Xtet, with Vicki Ray at the piano and guest clarinetist Philip O’Connor.

The concert ended in similar high style with a journey through the Shostakovich Piano Quintet of 1940 – music serene, sarcastic and dark at times but beautifully balanced. Two years before the garish Seventh Symphony – and, of course, a year before the disastrous Nazi invasion that necessitated such perversion of his artistic impulses – here is the work of a composer totally in command of his art. The comparison should be not with the overdrawn billboards of the wartime symphonies Nos. 7 and 8, but with the more self-possessed Ninth of 1945 – which, perforce, the Philharmonic also played last weekend – which immediately followed the war and which, in some ways, joins with this quintet as a pair of bookends surrounding Shostakovich’s wartime involvement. The further irony, of course, is that the quintet was well-received by Soviet higher-ups, while the Ninth Symphony, whose brash sarcasm was more readily noted than its rich fund of lyric impulse, almost landed him in Siberia.

The Shostakovich enigma remains to puzzle and delight. At the very least, his legacy embodies a repertory of intensely performable music, written down with a profound understanding of what it will sound like and how it will leap off a stage. In this, the kinship with Mahler is immediately apparent, and was especially so at last week’s Philharmonic program, where the Ninth shared the evening with Mahler’s Wunderhorn songs (about which more next week). Mozart is not far behind.

Photo by Heny Fair

In its several years’ existence, the Pacific Symphony’s American Composers Festival has staked out a broad and interesting territory, while expanding the very scope of its title: Aaron Copland at the movies, Antonin Dvorák in New York, Bill Bolcom’s entanglement with William Blake’s poetry, and – for two splendid weeks earlier this month – the Chinese diaspora to America. The concerts were nicely planned and well attended. The ideal now would be for some of its excellent new music, most of it unknown beforehand to audiences from Orange County and beyond, to find its way toward second hearings. The overall message from this festival is that the Chinese composers who have settled in our midst in the last several years constitute a potent creative force. Those who lament the assumed demise of the forward impulse in serious new music would do well to pay heed to what we have been hearing down off the 405 these past weeks.

Pay heed, in particular, to the music of Chen Yi, with whom I chatted in these pages a couple of weeks ago. She is one of the several composers sprung from Cultural
Revolution servitude in the 1980s, later educated at Columbia and Juilliard, who have evolved a strong manner of merging Chinese folk background, including a purposeful harmonic crudity, into a Western orchestral mastery shot through with dark glints. For the festival’s one commissioned work, she came up with a dazzling virtuoso piece for supercellist Yo-Yo Ma, a hand-in-glove collaboration. I had my reservations a couple of years ago about Yo-Yo Ma’s “Silk Road” programs, which struck me as a tad exploitative and self-conscious; Chen Yi’s new Ballad, Dance and Fantasy is superior stuff for composer and cellist/collaborator, an extraordinary synthesis of Chinese melodic essence and manic contemporaneity that reaches beyond borders, partakes of anything that comes under the rubric of “music,” pauses now and then for moments of sweetness, regains a dizzying momentum and, at a breath-stopping end, simply and wondrously evaporates.

Apparently unwilling to trust its own musical resources, the Pacific Symphony billed this final program not for its extraordinary musical content but as “The Great Yo-Yo Ma and Friends,” and on that strength it did, indeed, sell out the monster space of Segerstrom Hall for two performances. There was other splendid music on that program: Zhou Long’s rich, intense Two Poems From Tang, and Bright Sheng’s tragic tone poem China Dreams, music that seems suffused with the sadness of a composer happy in a new home but unable to forget an old one. Zhou Long, by the way, is married to Chen Yi; speculate for a moment on the pleasures and dangers of marriage between two composers of similar high quality.

Given a gathering of half a dozen concert events in as many musical styles, the freelancers that make up the Pacific Symphony acquitted themselves in, let’s say, not-bad fashion, as did yeoman conductor Carl St. Clair. Again, the festival was put together with high imagination –
surrounded by talks, demonstrations of Chinese instruments and art forms, and children’s concerts – by the New York–based Joseph Horowitz, who is what you might call a musical sociologist. His books deal with craze: the exploitation around the aged and near-senile Arturo Toscanini by the media, the bloodsucking at piano competitions (the Van Cliburn in particular), and the mania for Richard Wagner’s music that drove a generation of New York matrons bonkers in a Coney Island concert hall around 1890. You shouldn’t buy a concert ticket without first reading one of Joe Horowitz’s books.

On the matter of Van Cliburn, by the way, and on the matter of media fame: The last time Los Angeles saw the efforts of conductor Vassily Sinaisky was on a sad evening at the Hollywood Bowl in 1984. Sinaisky was leading his Moscow Philharmonic; Van Cliburn was the soloist, back after a long time away, in a heroic program of two concertos; the event was part of the World Cup celebrations. But the Cup that night ranneth over – Cliburn zonked out at intermission; bye-bye Sinaisky.

Last week Sinaisky returned to our own Philharmonic, standing in for Esa-Pekka Salonen to lead that media phenomenon known as the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony. Salonen’s reason for bowing out was his need for time to work on his new piece due here in June; if you know the Shostakovich Seventh, you should know that nobody needs an excuse for dropping out. If ever a work has survived on its fame and not on a shred of musical integrity, let it be this.

The fame, of course, is delicious. Summer 1942; Leningrad under siege; heroic Shostakovich remaining behind to complete the work, which is then smuggled by microfilm (via Tehran) to New York, where Toscanini and Stokowski are engaged in a gigantic hair-pull over first-performance rights. (Toscanini wins; the performance, now on CD, is a travesty.) Shostakovich makes the cover of Time. All that is lacking from any of this is the matter of quality. Crude, vulgar, monumentally dull in every page (except for a rather charming bass-clarinet solo in the second movement), the Shostakovich Seventh is an extraordinary example of music that bloats itself on its own fame. The Philharmonic has had the charming (if not entirely workable) idea of preceding each symphony in its Shostakovich survey with the string quartet of the same number, played in the pre-concert spot by members of the orchestra. The Seventh Quartet dates from 1960, 18 years after the symphony of that number, and it was rather amusing the other night to watch the evening’s speaker, musicologist Robert Fink, twist himself into knots trying to establish connections (which, of course, do not exist) between the gentle sarcasms of the lovely quartet and the bull-roars in the symphony.

“There is a river in Macedon and a river in Monmouth,” spouts Shakespeare’s pedantic Fluellen in trying to liken Alexander the Great to Henry the Fifth. It didn’t work then, either.

Photo by Dewey Neild

With a name like Steven Stucky, he has to be good, and so he is. Since his arrival at the Philharmonic in 1988, his official titles have included composer in residence, new-music adviser and, at present, consulting composer for new music. He is actually a composer in nonresidence; his day job is as a professor of composition at Cornell, and that’s all to the good, since he serves as a pipeline from the orchestra to life beyond the mountains and counteracts any imputation of provincialism at either end. His essays on the phenomenon of new music – what it means to create out in front of popular taste and expectation, what composers and their audience “owe” one another – have made the printed Green Umbrella programs over the years documents worth pondering and saving; I have several times urged him to submit them for publication. The list of new works he has created for the Philharmonic – for full orchestra or various component groups – forms a considerable repertory. His Second Concerto for Orchestra, which had its world premiere here last week under Esa-Pekka Salonen’s exuberant leadership, is a distinguished addition to that list.

I write of Stucky and his music in good faith and with genuine admiration. I think we are past the time of judging music as a branch of politics, liberal versus conservative, non-tonal radical versus defender of the C-major scale. There is too much bad, aimless, non-tonal showoff music around, and too much enthralling neo-tonal stuff from the John Adams gang et alii to make those old categories stick. The composer nowadays who has something to say, we can generally assume, has a pretty good handle on the language in which to say it. (There are exceptions, but we’ll get to her later.)

By that assumption, Stucky’s new piece shows him as an easy master of polyglot. He confessed as much in the pre-performance rituals at last week’s premiere, part of the Philharmonic’s First Nights series. Debussy and Stravinsky rank high among his household gods, as does Witold Lutoslawski, his onetime teacher. That in itself forms a fascinating amalgam: color, rhythm, propulsion. On the strength of one hearing, plus a few days with the score, the new work’s strongest music is its slow movement, a set of variations that range broadly across a vista of both land and sea, with bright solo instrumental writing and breath-stopping dark sonorities. There are glimpses, sure enough, of Debussy’s seascape – not as thievery but as tribute, which is a very different matter. The work is full of tributes, in fact Stucky refers to them as “friends”: musical puns wherein the notes themselves spell out names through a complex referring system more to be seen than heard. An opening movement, not much more than a fanfare with a short romantic interlude midway, and a boisterous, ovation-
generating finale frame this slow movement,

but the latter is the music I would most want to live with.

The First Nights have been popular; management tells me that the series was the first to sell out. Each of the events has been built around a premiere – Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the Beethoven Fifth and now this – with some dramatic effects onstage, some well-chosen bits of other music to complement the work in question, but also – alas – a copious outpouring of old-school music-appreciationese written and delivered by the actor John de Lancie in a manner that, last Friday night, raised such terms as “insufferable” to expressive heights. Festivities included an album of Stucky-family snapshots projected on the screen and a visit from an old school buddy (“This Is Your Life, Stevie Stucky”). Three local composers, after hearing the inconclusive first movement, got to come onstage and go “gee whiz” about the music in a gathering of clichés strained and embarrassing. About halfway, Stucky himself was finally vouchsafed the microphone, and, from then on, with the help of Salonen and the orchestra, actually explained and demonstrated some of the melodic and contrapuntal mechanisms of the new piece. Why there hadn’t been more of this genuinely valuable material, and less of the baloney, is something beyond my powers of explanation.

It had been, in fact, something of a Stucky week, to our greater pleasure. Monday’s Green Umbrella offered the world premiere of a song cycle, To Whom I Said Farewell. These are settings of four poems by A.R. Ammons: elegiac meditations on death from immediately inside the grave, set for mezzo-soprano (the marvelous Janice Felty, too long away) and 15 players. Solemn, melodically graceful pieces, these are Stucky’s best kind of music; they reflect the same impulses that, written somewhat larger, surge through the slower parts of the orchestral work. They also have its same sense of instrumental color. The texts were printed, in the program book, in black against a gray background; the house lights were kept low to render them illegible. Words like “inconsiderate” come to mind; also “stupid.”

Pianist Xak Bjerken, a faculty colleague of Stucky at Cornell, began the program with a set of attractive miniatures by Stucky and György Kurtág. Stucky’s Four Album Leaves of 2002 are no more than their title suggests: miniatures in, perhaps, the Schumann mold, with No. 3 – a slow-moving harmonic sequence – a particularly appealing small interlude. Eight Kurtág pieces from a set called Games were something more, however: small, self-contained explosions, intense and teeming with thoughts unsaid but swirling beneath a turbulent surface. Bjerken returned after intermission in Judith Weir’s Piano Concerto, which he has also recorded.

Try as I might, I cannot come away from Dame Judith’s music unwounded – in spirit and sometimes also in lower spine. She has previously crossed my path with musical evocations of Chinese opera and the Bayeux tapestry; on the matter of the concerto, in program note and pre-concert chat, she had the gall to pass off this twiddly small concoction as something Mozartian – pinpointing the Piano Concerto K. 449 as the specific target. Is there no justice? Dame Judith’s aspirations have elevated her this time not to anything remotely dreamed of in Herr von Köchel’s catalog, but something closer to the tea-and-crumpets manner of Cécile Chaminade, with a naughty wrong note here and there to tickle the peasantry. Christopher Rouse’s Compline was the attractive ending work, music inspired by the bells of Rome’s churches but actually scored for the instrumentation of Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro: harp, winds, string quartet. Smart coattail riding, that, and smart music as well.

(Photo by Betty Freeman)

In the music of Osvaldo Golijov I hear a robust proclamation of joy in the creative act. It is a mere dozen years since he first flashed across the horizon with his Yiddishbuk – which, by the way, the St. Lawrence String Quartet will perform on March 25 at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall – but in those years he has demonstrated an astounding mastery of music in remarkable variety. It helps, of course, that the variety in his composition reflects the pattern of the 44 years (so far) of his own life. Understanding his background – of Eastern European Jewish refugee parents, a boyhood in Argentina, thence to Israel and to the U.S. for study with, among others, George Crumb – makes it easier to reconcile, say, the dark, Judaic lamentations in the Yiddishbuk and the surging, pagan-Christian-Latino vitality of his St. Mark Passion.

Two weeks ago the Philharmonic arranged a small Latin (mostly Argentine) music festival around Golijov’s visit, with his new chamber opera, Ainadamar, as the centerpiece and with associate conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya (now also out front with the Fort Worth Symphony) here to conduct. Inevitably the orchestral program included music by Argentina’s top-dog composers Alberto Ginastera (the Variaciones Concertantes, which is much more European/ international than indigenous/Latin in style) and Astor Piazzolla (the Bandoneón Concerto, which is very Argentine in style, very charming but also rather naive). Golijov’s Last Round for string orchestra, which the Philharmonic first played two seasons ago, was by some distance the evening’s best work, fragrant and serene.

Golijov’s Ainadamar, which filled the next night’s Green Umbrella program, held the major interest. It lasts but an hour; at its Tanglewood premiere last summer it shared a double bill. Although it’s listed as a “chamber opera,” its performing forces – with a generous percussion contingent, a sound crew and 14 vocal roles – were hardly “chamber”-size. There were moments, in fact, when the enterprise threatened to overflow Disney Hall’s capacious stage – and its electronic equipment as well.

The text, by Broadway’s David Henry Hwang, tells of the death of Spain’s hero-poet Federico García Lorca and of the great actress Margarita Xirgu, whom he memorialized in one of his plays. The aging Margarita, shrouded in flashbacks of her life, occupies center stage; García Lorca himself moves in and out of her shadows. Ainadamar (“Fountain of Tears”) is the spring in Granada near where the poet, yoked to two common criminals, was executed by Franco’s minions at the start of Spain’s Civil War; the opera begins and ends with taped sounds of flowing water.

There are great beauties here, and small imperfections. With all my respect for Hwang’s dramatic sense (M Butterfly, etc.), I find his handling of the timeworn old-lady-flashback formula, with its interminable crowding-in of final echoes and voices, depressingly facile. His play – and therefore its concomitant music – runs out of steam some 10 minutes before its end and thus loses what has been until then a rewarding and haunting experience.

So much, however, is good. There is a tone color in the voice of Dawn Upshaw, a blend of womanliness and intensity, that Golijov knows exactly how to orchestrate; she brings to his music that marvelous power to seek out the exact passion in the simplest melodic turn. (He tells me that he is working on a set of Spanish Sephardic song settings for her. Lucky Osvaldo; lucky Dawn.) As García Lorca there was Kelley O’Connor, a young mezzo, now a graduate student at UCLA, one of those remarkable young artists who arrive in our midst with voice and instincts fully formed from the start. I had seen her in student productions (the Ravel double bill at UCLA last season) when it was too soon to single her out. Now I can. Actually, she reminded me the other night of an occasion 19 years ago, when I happened to be in New York and a manager begged me to come and hear an unknown new singer, and I was bowled over. I have a tape of that event, and I use it instead of pills. It was Dawn Upshaw singing Schubert.

“Cleverness is not necessarily lovely,” Mel Powell once wrote, in lines quoted in a recent REDCAT program, “nor is loveliness necessarily clever.” The California EAR Unit’s recent tribute to their onetime friend and mentor was enough to prove that, in at least one instance of Powell’s music, those attributes did come together. What a treasure was this Mel Powell! Everything in his varied life formed a unity in his music: the early triumphs as a jazz pianist (with the Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller bands as well as his own), the studies with the formidable Paul Hindemith, his pioneering work in electronic music, the teaching, even the early years as a semipro baseball player and tennis nut. His musical legacy is full of sparkling, intricately cut jewelry, some exquisitely infinitesimal and some as expansive as the sunrise.

The REDCAT program was like a bygone civilization brought miraculously to life: a time when the EAR Unit was still a bunch of eager graduate students at CalArts, with Mel Powell among them zooming down the corridors on his motorized wheelchair. Most of their program last month consisted of music Powell had composed for them – as individuals or a group – so that the entire evening was a family affair. It began, in fact, with a “new” media concoction wherein percussion virtuosa Amy Knoles “remixed” an old Mel Powell abstract painting with the ensemble’s recording of Powell’s Immobiles.

Powell’s 1996 Sextet, his last work of consequence, written two years before his death, ended the program, as much a love letter from composer to performers as music can boast. From first note to last, he guided his six players through the art of conversation: the solo statement, the refutation, the argle-bargle, the rumination, the reconciliation. If you need a single work to define the essence of chamber music, let it be this. If you need a single group of supremely dedicated players to define the essence of what it means to make music together, let it be these.

Photo by Robert Millard

Of the two composers named Strauss – unrelated, so far as anyone knows – who commanded the attention at downtown emporia in recent weeks, it was Richard who generated the louder noise and Johann Jr. who made the prettier music. Some of my colleagues seemed put out to discover something so trivial (their word, not mine) as one of Johann’s waltzes in the sacred precincts of a Philharmonic subscription concert. Others had the wisdom to apply adjectives like “silly” to the four-hour endurance challenge of Richard’s Die Frau ohne Schatten at Mrs. Chandler’s newly anointed opera house. I’m only happy that Mrs. Chandler wasn’t around for this ordeal – happy, and perhaps a little envious.

Guest conductor Franz Welser-Möst, Austrian by birth (not quite Vienna, but Linz – of the Linzer Torte – which is close enough), drew on a fine old Viennese tradition, honored by the likes of Furtwängler and Walter, by ending his Philharmonic program with Johann Jr. in three-four: Künstler-Leben, to be specific, with all the intros and repeats to bring the work out to respectable length. You could, if you wished, stir in your seat and grumble at the sacrilege of introducing such fluff into precincts where Beethoven has so recently reigned. You could also, if you preferred, tune in on this quite superb performance, drink in the elegance of the unique orchestration – first violins doubled by piccolo in the first theme, for one delight of many – and marvel at how this splendid young conductor managed to put across the peculiarity of the Viennese rubato, with that subtle holding-back on the second beat, in only a couple of days’ rehearsal.

I have not always been that taken with Welser-Möst’s conducting, and I found some of last week’s Philharmonic program – above all, the Schubert “Unfinished” and the collaboration with Radu Lupu on Mozart’s A-major Piano Concerto (K. 488) – a shade lacking in grace. His programming at his new post with the Cleveland Orchestra has been full of adventure and new music; I wonder why he came here with so old-fashioned a bill. Lupu’s performance of the Mozart, with its divinely melancholic slow movement, seemed offhand, as much audibly slouching as he actually appeared onstage. Alban Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra of 1913-14 instilled a little more life: great, thudding echoes of a young man’s agonies as a world closes down around him (and, thus, an interesting mirror of the awful Richard Strauss biz from the same years going on just up the street).

Yet the waltz of Artists’ Life was the evening’s real event. It sent me scurrying back to my own collection – most of all to my videos of two New Year’s concerts at Vienna’s Musikverein conducted by Carlos Kleiber, and to an even older CD by his father, Erich. These performances are more than musical experiences; they are lessons in a subtle and (I would have thought) untranslatable language, beyond explanation by any system of supertitles yet invented. Yet the young Welser-Möst had our Philharmonic speaking it – no, singing it – remarkably well.

Richard Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten bears some kind of contemporary relevance, I suppose; it accomplishes the feat of delivering messages of comfort and joy both to readers of Betty Friedan and to bombers of abortion clinics. It delivers the same message – married life is better with babies – in four hours that Mozart’s Papageno and Papagena deliver in four minutes. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s overwrought outrage of a fairy tale accorded with literary tastes circa 1912; Richard Strauss, post-Elektra/Salome, easily commanded its musical equivalent. Today it serves the needs of painters with full pots of garish colors at their disposal, and designers with vast arrays of stage machinery to play with. Its most famous American production was as the showoff piece for the scenery-changing gadgetry at the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966. Its one positive attribute at that time was the heavy cutting imposed on the score by its conductor, Karl Böhm, which the Los Angeles Opera preserved in the John Cox production first seen here in 1993 and now, restaged by Patrick Young, in its return. It runs through March 13.

By some distance, the current revival is the best production of the work I’ve seen or could imagine seeing, better by far than the Metropolitan Opera’s tinfoil spectacular (now replaced) or the austere video version from Salzburg (conducted by Georg Solti at such breakneck tempos that, uncut, it runs almost the same time as the cut version seen here). In 1993, Randall Behr was the hapless conductor of a cast of comparable mediocrity, so that my memories of the David Hockney stage designs survived mostly in black and white. Now, finally, I have them in full color – great globs of color, a huge 3-D impasto of exquisite bad taste exactly in tune with the music – thanks to the musical outlines of the performance itself. Kent Nagano’s surging, billowing orchestra lays siege to the senses with what may be the world’s first audible legal narcotic.

The cast – one and all – proves as worthily chosen as the 1993 aggregation was unworthy. Inga Nielsen is the Empress, smaller and brighter of voice than the usual Wagnerian soprano (Leonie Rysanek in the Böhm recording), and by that measure more sympathetic; Linda Watson as the shrewish Dyer’s Wife is, by the same token, further down the scale of humanness and thus more overpowering. Best of all is Wolfgang Brendel as Barak the Dyer, a truly memorable portrait. Never have I been tempted to urge upon my reading public so horrendous a musical baggage purely on the strength of performance values . . . well, hardly ever.

There was a time in China, Chen Yi remembers, when playing Paganini on your violin – or Mozart or Beethoven – could land you in a labor prison, with your instrument confiscated or burned. “I was about 13,” she says, “and I remember that I had to play with heavy blankets over the windows, and a big iron mute over the strings to mute the sound.”

That began to happen in 1966, at the time of the infamous “Cultural Revolution” (which was anything but cultural), organized to support the artistic policies of Mao Zedong and his nihilistic wife and carried forward by the formidable Red Guard and their up-front “Gang of Four.” One astonishing result from that sorry page in Chinese history, however, has been the emergence of yet another gang of four: four composers of extraordinary talent, born within four years of one another (1953–57), all of them with the same history – early musical talent, crushed by governmental forced labor for a time, emerging the better for their experience to gain international fame. All four – Chen Yi; her husband, Zhou Long; Bright Sheng; and Tan Dun – managed the transition to American acclaim (and residence) in the 1980s. All four are in Orange County this week to participate in the Pacific Symphony’s annual “American Composers” festival. That event reaches its climax on March 10 and 11 at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Hall, with music by all four composers performed by Carl St. Clair and the Pacific Symphony, including the world premiere of Chen Yi’s Ballad, Dance and Fantasy for Cello and Orchestra, with Yo-Yo Ma as soloist. During the week, the festival also includes music by one more Chinese composer, our own – Pasadena’s, that is – Joan Huang.

On the phone from her home in Brooklyn, just back from performances of her Chinese Myths Cantata in England – a characteristic work combining indigenous instruments and men’s chorus (Chanticleer) – Chen Yi is her usual sparkle, sounding very much like her piece of that name which stole the show at a Green Umbrella concert not long ago. Her message, however, is anything but sparkly as she reminisces about life under that other Gang of Four. “I think my life was even more miserable than the other composers, because my parents were really, really bad – in the eyes of Madame Mao, that is. My father was a doctor, which meant that he had contact with all kinds of Western medicine – very bad. My mother worked in a hospital. When the Red Guards came first to our building, in 1966, our neighbors tried to tell them that we were good people and that they should leave us alone, and so they went away for a while. But in 1968 they came back. My mother was made a prisoner in that hospital, and I was taken out to work, to plant vegetables – barefoot – and to carry 100-pound loads of stone and mud up the hill, maybe 20 times a day.”

It’s only recently that we have come to realize the impact of that horrifying decade in Chinese cultural history: the destruction of an entire educational system, and of an educated generation. Throughout that overpopulated nation, young people raised in good middle-class homes were forced to abandon their career ambitions and were shanghaied into labor camps and youth gangs in the Chinese countryside. We know their story only because of the few happy endings – the four surviving composers brought together by favoring circumstance being one example.

Yet the benefits from just this small composer group have already had an impact on the contemporary musical scene. All four composers have provided a substantial repertory of striking, original music: the delightful sound creations (involving water, paper and all manner of toy creations as well as large-scale devices) that sent Tan Dun high onto the charts, the wrenching musical memoirs of Bright Sheng (including his H’un – Lacerations — which begins the Orange County Festival) and the remarkably vivid works of Chen Yi with their rich, colorful combinations of large-scale “Western” orchestral tone and the dark mysteries of sinuous Chinese melodies.

Somehow, fate – or the ancient gods of music – intervened in the case of these four young musicians, all of them initially dragged off toward a destiny similar to Chen Yi’s. Dog-tired as she was by her daily exertions, she still found time to entertain her co-workers with revolutionary songs on her violin at night. “I felt a big release,” she says, “in being able to exercise some creativity in making something out of these circumstances. Frankly, it wasn’t until the Cultural Revolution that I found my roots, my motherland, and really appreciated the simple people of the earth. I found my own language when I realized that my mother tongue is really the same as what the farmers speak.” Off in Mongolia, her future husband, Zhou Long, in another labor camp, experienced the same epiphany, driving a tractor by day and playing the accordion for folk dances at night. Bright Sheng taught himself piano at a work farm in Qinghai province. Tan Dun, youngest and most completely self-taught of the four, planted rice in a commune by day and sought out musical sounds in rocks, water and paper by night.

“In 1970,” Chen Yi remembers, “Madame Mao had composed a revolutionary opera, a big piece that needed a Western-style orchestra. But all the Western-style musicians in Beijing had been fired and sent to prison camps, so they needed a new orchestra, and very quickly. So suddenly I had a job playing my violin, out in the open! Not only that, I had to compose a lot of music, very quickly: overtures, dance pieces, songs. Now I had a job, and most of the other composers came to work with me in the Beijing Opera as well. We had a company that toured through many cities, and that made life a little better.”

By 1977, the Cultural Revolution was over and the Chinese conservatories could be open again. Chen Yi had a huge pile of compositions to submit, from the music that she had composed for the operas. “No, it wasn’t very good,” she says, “and no, I don’t want to use any of it now, but everybody was amazed that I had such a large pile. Still, I had to start at the beginning, to learn orchestration techniques and harmonies and to do all the straight things that I had been doing just by instincts. In 1986, the Chinese Central Philharmonic gave a whole concert of my work. But I had gone as far as I could at the Beijing Conservatory, so I applied to Columbia and was accepted. I got a visa in one week – imagine that!

“Also I got to travel with Tan Dun, on a project to collect folk music in Chinese villages. We would travel some distance on a bus, and then we would walk, maybe 90 miles, to where there was a singer, or a musician that we could record.” This was the same thing that Bartók had done, recording the folk music of his native Hungary, and it helps to define the particular strength in the music of Chen Yi. Listen to her latest disc: Momentum, a 13-minute orchestral work on Sweden’s BIS label, or The Music of Chen Yi on New Albion; not packaged exotica on the Rimsky-Korsakov level, these are strong, confrontational pieces in which the strands of Chen Yi’s own concerns stand forth in stark relief.

In Orange County last November, a production of Madama Butterfly opened on a stageful of bustle: a consular office in old Nagasaki with secretaries at typewriters, young Japanese clerks pushing papers around, girls singing “Quanti fiori!” with nary a flower in sight, Lieutenant Pinkerton and marriage broker Goro hot and heavy in negotiations – all in coordination with Puccini’s busy, contrapuntal music. At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion last week, the Los Angeles Opera’s Madama Butterfly began on an empty stage, the figures of Pinkerton and Goro picked out in strong lighting against an equally strong background of color, further identified by the contrast in the way each man held his hands, and with nothing else onstage except a flat landscape punctuated in the distance by a small bridge over a stream. The Orange County Butterfly was Francesca Zambello’s 5-year-old production from Houston, restaged for Opera Pacific by Garnett Bruce; the L.A. Opera’s was Robert Wilson’s 1993 creation for the Paris Opéra de Bastille, rebuilt here for its North American premiere. Having seen both productions within three months, and been bowled over both times, I find myself obliged to retract a lifetime’s worth of negative estimates of the value of Puccini’s exquisite tragedy.

Wilson’s Butterfly soars, of course, as much in coordination with its own inner music as with Puccini’s; yet the remarkable effect is to leave you closer to its personalities than you might have believed possible. Unlike current and recent smart-ass directors who must reinvent story lines to accord with their advanced visions of an opera’s “true meaning” (names on request), Wilson’s way seems in general to be one of subtraction rather than addition. His sole Butterfly addition has been to create an enhanced stage presence for the boy cast as “Trouble,” the leftover son of Butterfly and Pinkerton’s romance, but this has been so artfully done – and enacted so charmingly by 10-year-old James Prival – as to disarm complaint.

Verónica Villarroel was the opening-night Butterfly, not her first time here as a “sweet and sad” heroine, if you remember 1994’s ill-fated El Gato Montès; the voice is now a little less sweet, perhaps, but she stood well on opening night and captured Wilson’s lighting. (Two others will assume the role during the 14-performance run, Angela Maria Blasi and Xiu Wei Sun.) John Matz was the nicely lyrical Pinkerton; Susanna Poretsky, the rich-voiced Suzuki. Greg Fedderly, as Goro, mastered best of all a stylized “Japanese” walk; I could swear he was on wheels. Kent Nagano’s musical leadership, in fact, put the whole evening on wheels, smooth and well on track.

The “inner music” is most aptly defined through Wilson’s vocabulary of body movement, a quantity always cherishable in musical theater, but something intrinsic and unique in his language. Memorable moments abound; just to observe this one quality – how it works even on a stage as large as ours, and how it interlocks with constant color changes in lighting – would be worth a return visit. Take one small but crucial moment: the meeting near the end between Butterfly and Kate Pinkerton, the innocent cause of her ruination. Just the contrast in the two women’s holding of their arms – Butterfly stiff, Kate beckoning and natural – spells out the culture barrier, the uncrossable bridge so clearly defined at that moment. Take that further, as Wilson implicitly demands, and recognize what that bridge will symbolize in the future tragedy when that beautiful boy of Butterfly and Pinkerton’s loving is forcefully carried into the American life his philandering father and his new, insignificant wife have come to represent. You don’t get that from any dime-a-dozen Butterfly production; I did, from Bob Wilson.

Wilson’s operatic repertory is small, because his choices fall only upon works that generate that kind of resonance. I ache to see Einstein on the Beach once – or 10 times – again. His technique is famous, and sometimes ridiculed by nonbelievers, for the rehearsal time he spends on the sort of detail I’ve tried to describe; I watched him once, in Rome for the Civil Wars that Los Angeles never got, working for three hours on the lighting on a hand. I worry, therefore, at the news that the Los Angeles Opera will revive this Madama Butterfly in three or four years, but that Wilson will not be here to supervise its preparation.

Jon Vickers’ performance as Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes comes close to being the finest single operatic performance on video; it was available on laser disc and now has been re-formatted on a Kultur DVD. The performance is from London’s Royal Opera in 1981, conducted by Colin Davis and directed by Elijah Moshinsky; it is therefore the same production that came here during the Olympic Arts Festival in 1984. Even Britten, who had written the part for Peter Pears, was obliged to accept the Vickers performance as the more complete fulfillment of this harrowing, tragic role.

You get it from the start, that amazing throb that epitomizes defiance and helplessness at the inquest into the death of his first ‘prentice. “What harbor shelters peace . . .?” – is there a vocal line of greater desperation anywhere else in music? (Yes, perhaps in Schubert’s Die Winterreise, but elsewhere?) Peter Grimes has become an essential opera, and there have been excellent performances since Vickers’ time, even here. Yet this DVD, with the fine Ellen Orford of Heather Harper and the sturdy Balstrode of Norman Bailey, is also an essential part of an operatic collection.

So is Alban Berg’s Lulu, which has yet to make it to these precincts. (Don’t hang by your thumbs.) It’s interesting enough that a new DVD of the work (not the first) is of a performance from Britain’s Glyndebourne Festival, shrine of great Mozart and Monteverdi; mountains do get to move now and then. This is also a tremendous presentation: Christine Schäfer in an exact mix of kitten and tiger, Kathryn Harries as a sad old blunderbuss of a Countess Geschwitz, Andrew Davis leading the strong, well-paced performance I would not have expected from him 10 years ago. Truly amazing, the operatic repertory currently available on DVD. Robert Wilson? For starters, there is Gluck’s Alceste from Paris, directed by Wilson, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, with Anne Sofie von

Otter in the title role; who could ask for
anything more?

Tchaikovsky at Royce Hall, Schumann at Disney: After three weeks of Berlioz’s hectoring, perhaps it was time to ride the warhorses for a couple of nights. Last week they ran sleek and handsome.

It’s easy enough, in my line of work, to face an evening’s gig with an inevitable “oh no, not the Tchaikovsky Fifth again” attitude. Hereabouts, the Fifth is a hardy perennial, indoors at the Music Center, outdoors at the Bowl. I’ve written a whole book on the Fifth (HarperCollins, out of print here, published also in Taiwan), and I didn’t think there was anything new for me to learn about it. At Royce, Daniele Gatti and London’s Royal Philharmonic proved me wrong. His zippy tempos, achieved by his mostly young players at no loss of clarity, gave the first movement a buoyancy I’d seldom if ever heard before; his marshaling of lights and shadows in the waltz movement seemed to evoke real swans this once. Best yet, the hornist in the slow movement achieved his famously romantic solo without the smarmy vibrato that I always believed was built into that dreaded moment, and turned it instead into something close to music.

Gatti is 42. He guest-conducted our own Philharmonic in 1991. From the evidence of this program – which he had to trundle around to three other Southern California venues before arriving here – and from the recording on Harmonia Mundi, he has built one of London’s “other” orchestras into a much-improved ensemble. His beat is strong and clear; it’s obvious that his motions are for the orchestra, not the audience. Gatti’s program at Royce began with a first-rate Prokofiev “Classical,” the strings like gossamer, the winds all a-twinkle and the pacing bright and bouncy. Midway, and best of all, came an absolutely splendid reading of the Mozart 40th. Here, again, is music I think I know backwards and forwards and every way in between; yet I found myself astonished and bolt upright at the gorgeous wind writing in the trio of the minuet that had somehow passed me by a couple of thousand times before. I liked that Gatti seats the orchestra in the classic manner, with the second violins down front on the conductor’s right and the basses up in back. At Royce, at least, it made for a stronger, more forward sound. (It did at Disney the next night, too, in fact, when guest conductor Christoph von Dohnányi also seated the Los Angeles Philharmonic that same way for another “warhorses” program.)

One sour note, or two, however, may be in order. The program booklet for Gatti’s concert, while reasonably informative about the music itself, lacked the customary courtesy of a list of orchestra personnel, leaving unstated the fact that the horn soloist in the Tchaikovsky was John Bimson, or that Tim Watts and Leila Ward played the exquisite oboe duet in the Mozart. Programs by traveling orchestras invariably provide these lists, and the booklet for the same concert did so when the Royal Philharmonic played in Orange County the week before. At Royce, however, last month’s concert by John Eliot Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir went on unaccompanied by the customary text sheet, nor was there a text provided for the Bach Passion According to St. John when the Suzuki Ensemble from Japan performed it there last season.

All of this suggests that somewhere in the management of UCLA Live there is a decline of caring about the integrity of the presentation of serious music, a suspicion supported by a serious tapering off in the number of serious musical events this season compared to previous years. From my limited knowledge of demographics, it seems to me that the opposite should be true. After the Gatti concert I approached David Sefton, the head of UCLA Live, and I think that perhaps the word “shame” passed my lips. Mr. Sefton, not widely known as a charmer, waxed hissy. “Do you know that it cost me 180,000 fuckin’ dollars to bring those people over . . .” Those words having explained the situation to his satisfaction, if not to mine, I took my leave.

Christoph von Dohnányi tried hard and nobly to make Schumann’s Second Symphony lovable in his guest stint with the Philharmonic, and came as close as anyone can. It just won’t work. The opening fanfares, the impact of trumpets smudged by trombones, are already wrong; the first movement seems to consist of balloons inflating and running out of air. A pretty scherzo, a kind of Mendelssohnian outtake, puffs along merrily. Then comes that slow movement, the apotheosis of droop, and the grand bravado of the finale that backs our hapless composer into a corner out of which he bravely marches amid a battalion of tin soldiers. I hear 10 minutes of interesting music in this Second Symphony, which even the eloquence of Dohnányi’s presentation, the sleek elegance of the strings, the nicely balanced sparkle of the winds, could not prolong into the 40 minutes it demanded of my time.

It’s good to know that Dohnányi, whose 20-year contract with the Cleveland Orchestra precluded his guest appearances with other American orchestras, is finally on the loose. As a Philharmonic welcome guest, much admired by the players, according to my private grapevine, he could provide a valuable connection with a Central European repertory that may not reside entirely within Salonen’s orbit. On last week’s program he also led a beautiful, dark reading of Mozart’s “other” G-minor Symphony (No. 25), with its slow movement that went by like a passing, scented cloud, and a serious Til Eulenspiegel somewhat low on jokes and, therefore, above average, musically responsible. Even among the warhorses, it doesn’t hurt to do a little thinking now and then.

Photo courtesy of L.A. Philharmonic

The sounds of Hector Berlioz and the shape of Walt Disney Concert Hall are a perfect match. It was fitting, therefore, that the Philharmonic’s three wondrous weeks celebrating this most certifiably mad of certifiably sane composers should thunder to their close last weekend with a dizzying photomontage: a 90 or so seconds’ sweep across the two centuries since Berlioz’s birth that took in the invention of the railroad and a few other gadgets, a couple of world wars, Adolf Hitler, Marilyn Monroe and the building of Disney Hall – a proper visual counterpart to the comparably dizzying final pages of the Symphonie Fantastique. Alors!

The celebration of Berlioz’s 200th birthday, which involved our two major performing forces at the top of their form, was an altogether creditable event; I don’t know of a better parlay of Berlioz celebration and top-grade performance anywhere else, here or abroad. At the Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen was the hero of heroes, beginning with his glowing reading of L’Enfance du Christ two Christmases ago and continuing this past month with three programs that mingled familiar works with valuable, less-known music, and also with intelligent parings of “problem” scores with which, it pains me to inform you, the Berlioz legacy teems. (Still to come, in late May, is the mighty Requiem, the Grande Messe des Morts. Its scheduling collides with the Ojai Festival, but it is an inevitable event even so. You have to believe that our new concert hall was conceived with the sound and shape – four brass bands! four choruses!! drums as far as the eye can see!!! – of this Berliozian lollapalooza in mind.) Alongside these Philharmonic wonders was the L.A. Opera’s spectacular treatment of La Damnation de Faust, all aglow with director/designer Achim Freyer’s proof – above evidence clumsily proffered at San Francisco and at other companies here and there – that Berlioz’s quirky concert piece can work brilliantly onstage. The L.A. Opera, by the way, is supposed to be readying a DVD of that terrific achievement; watch the skies.

Disney Hall, as I was saying, was put on Earth to house the sound of Berlioz. Here was a composer, after all, who knew the value not only of the grand roar but also of the near-silence. The sad shepherd’s piping in the slow movement of the Fantastique seemed encased at Disney in a silence you could caress. One of the great Berlioz silences comes at the end of the “Funeral March for the Last Scene of Hamlet,” which concludes the little suite called Tristia (“sad pieces”) that Salonen revived out of nowhere on the second program: solemn brass and a wordless chorus retreating upon Horatio’s “Go, bid the soldiers shoot . . .” Alas, on the first night, a medical occurrence in a balcony ruined part of the moment; friends who were there the next night reported the “silence” as awesome. It’s a wonderful eight-minute piece, by the way, surely the best “unknown” work brought out of obscurity for the festival.

But then there were the racketings that the new hall’s welcoming spaces made clear as I had never heard them made clear before: Romeo screaming his song of sorrow in rude counterpoint against the Capulets’ party music in the nicely rearranged pastiche that Salonen had made out of Roméo et Juliette; the tocsins of doom at the end of the Fantastique, with not just dinky chimes but huge, hall-shaking brass bells perhaps swiped from some nearby cathedral. Harold in Italy is one of those “problem” pieces, rather given to chasing its own tale at times, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard so exquisite a balance as Salonen achieved this time between its viola soloist – the splendid young Nokuthula Ngwenyama – and Berlioz’s bulldozer orchestra.

Anne Sofie von Otter was radiantly on hand for the Nuits d’Été song cycle, the one work of Berlioz that nobody doesn’t like; she also sang the long solo in the Roméo, where Salonen had the good sense to separate the two alike stanzas with other music from that difficult work. Another intelligent touch was the inclusion of the lovely Mort d’Ophélie in its two versions, the one as sung by von Otter as a solo with piano, and the other, a week later, by a women’s chorus as part of Tristia. And another smart move was to include Berlioz’s essay on the Beethoven Ninth in the program book for a concert the week before the festival. It certainly cast a stronger light on that masterwork than did the performance under Zubin Mehta.

By now you may be wondering about that photomontage, and well you might. It happened at the third and final program of the Berlioz wingding, when Salonen joined forces with the excellent British media group Complicite (spelled without the accent but pronounced “complicity”; those Brits!), who had created a marvelous theater piece around a Shostakovich quartet at UCLA in 2002. With Complicite’s narrators, singers and filmmakers in tow, the matter at hand was not only the Symphonie Fantastique – for which Berlioz had, after all, spelled out a grandiose scenario involving drugs, demons and diverse dalliances – but also Lélio, the sequel, in which the “hero” returns to life, metamorphoses into a narrator and an MC for a concert program with singers, chorus, piano and orchestra, and has further hallucinations, mostly involving himself as Hamlet. Okay so far?

Well, now, it has been the pleasure of Complicite’s Simon McBurney and his troupe to turn things upside down, starting with the order of events itself – Lélio being, at best, rather weak tea to follow the wild churnings at the end of the Fantastique‘s Witches’ Sabbath. Musically, therefore, the reversal worked just fine: The collection of Lélio‘s small pretties – a fisherman’s ballade here, some jolly brigands there – were soon dashed from the memory by the surging, marvelously colored Fantastique that has now become one of Salonen’s great properties. Visually, however, the reversal process didn’t work so well. The stage pictures for Lélio were okay, sort of, although McBurney’s painstaking delivery of Berlioz’s words – one of those superheated Romantic “Who am I who seeks and doth not find?” affairs – could have used the pruning shears. (I’m probably spoiled by the old Jean-Louis Barrault recording, with Boulez conducting, a doozy!) The projected imagery for the Fantastique seemed to consist mostly of one man fighting off sleep. He couldn’t have been listening to the Salonen performance.

But then, at the end, there came that grand whoopee, wherein sight and sound did for each other exactly what each has needed lo these 200 years, superfast and superswell. Who’s crazy now?

“This must be what the gods were like,” writes Craig Seligman about Così Fan Tutte in the latest issue of the excellently wise Threepenny Review – which, by happenstance, landed on my doorstep on the eve of Opera Pacific’s production of Mozart’s sublimely ridiculous, tragic operatic comedy. Only gods, indeed, could contrive the harmonies that rise like audible ambrosia as the girls in Act 1 bind their departing swains to promises of once-a-day letter writing. Only a goddess could hurl divinely accurate thunderbolts across vast skyscapes as the heroine Fiordiligi proclaims the unassailability of her supernal womanly honor. And only a composer whose hand is flawlessly guided by Forces From Above could contrive an ensemble for four voices, the first three entering one at a time, with the same tune in exquisite harmony, the fourth (having partaken too freely from the flask) disrupting the shebang with a whole ‘nother vocal line about his own drunken anger.

Così has had its problems, and still does. Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto, even if based on an actual episode as reported in a Viennese scandal sheet of the time, takes a low view of bedroom politics both His and Hers. Romantic audiences were shocked, shocked; if the opera was performed at all, it was often with a new title and text. It reached its first American audience only in the 1920s, 130 years late; what a treat it must have been to share the surprise and delight of a New York audience at the “Winds” Trio, the “Per pietà” duet with horn and every other godlike note on that magical evening! (Not unanimously: Paul Rosenfield, the critic I respect the most from that time, found it “elegant fribble.”) It helped the cause not at all that neither text nor music leaves a clue as to whether the girls, after having been deceived into falling in love with each other’s boyfriends (in high disguise, of course), then return to the original pairings or stay with the new suitors: a happy ending built on foundations of sand, in other words, or the ultimate cynical reflection on woman’s fickleness. In Bernard Uzan’s staging for Costa Mesa, they most decidedly stayed with the new guys; la donna è mobile indeed!

Somebody in the company obviously values the opera highly, and one of them was clearly the company’s music director, John DeMain, whose musical conception – horns and clarinets pressed into a wine fit for the gods, strings woven into the finest silk – flowed as a kind of chamber music writ large. The cast looked and, for the most part, sounded young and marvelously involved: Pamela Armstrong and Kristine Jepson as the donne mobile, Eric Cutler and the remarkably suave Kyle Ketelsen as their conniving swains, John Packard a somewhat weak-voiced Alfonso, and Alicia Berneche, a scene-stealer to the manner born, in the great theft-worthy role of Despina.

Opera Pacific’s opening-night performance played to a sea of empty seats; where were you? The production was an old Jean-Pierre Ponnelle number, created originally for the Michigan Opera during that company’s days of partnership with Opera Pacific, and obviously well-traveled since then. (Judging from a video of a Ponnelle Così, a few background pieces have been lost along the way.) A few old touches remain, however: the girls’ quick costume changes from white to black reflecting the mood of the moment, the wine bottle (evidence of the men’s wager on the girls’ fidelity) that remains center-stage, Grail-like, through the opera.

Midway in its 18th season – the same age as the Los Angeles Opera – Opera Pacific, in its first two productions, has offered standard repertory stuff but in far-above-standard performances. I still can’t get over how much I was moved, against all better judgments, by its Madama Butterfly a couple of months ago, and now this. John DeMain’s musical leadership is strong; from the way he is greeted in the hall, the audience seems to recognize his qualities. But that audience is way too small – which is another way of saying that Segerstrom Hall is much too big – and with the new concert hall a-building the company is going to have more dates to fill in a couple of years. Its repertory is safe and standard, although I’m happy to see some Gilbert and Sullivan on next season’s schedule. The company has its assets, however: DeMain, and good young singers like the ones who made up this Così cast. (Ketelsen returns next season as Mozart’s Figaro.)

On gloomier days the gods weep at the fate of the nameless wanderer of Wilhelm Müller’s poetry, as set to music in Franz Schubert’s Die Winterreise. Sanford Sylvan, the Figaro and Alfonso of Mozart’s operas, the Chou En-lai and Klinghoffer of Adams’, had the wisdom to let Schubert’s set of 24 songs draw the audience’s tears on their own last Saturday night. Other singers succumb to the temptation to take a greater part in these unstageable dramas, and if truth be known, this sovereign music does bristle with temptation to act out – with voice, gesture or, in some sorry examples, with actual staged dramas – events along the misanthrope’s downward path.

Sylvan did not. “Intelligent” is the operative word, as on his marvelous Nonesuch disc of Schubert’s other cycle, Die Schöne Müllerin. Give or take the information that he was fighting off a bit of the whatever – as who isn’t, this time of year? – his singing was remarkably straightforward and admirably vivid, strongly seconded by David Breitman’s piano. (But was the piano’s out-of-tune-ness supposed to be an “authentic” touch?) Sylvan’s is not a voice you’d call beautiful; it’s an even-textured darkish brown with not much velvet. His German tends more toward the hard-toned North (“Liebken”) than Schubert’s softer Viennese (“Liebschen”), and I put this forward merely as observation, not criticism. I admire most his ability to let the music score its own points. By the time his singing had filled in that chill final picture – of the derelict-hero, more dead than alive, seeking the companionship of the frozen-fingered organ grinder – the wind-chill factor in the handsome precincts of the Doheny Mansion, where this “Historic Sites” concert took place, had sunk out of sight. Brrr, as in brrravo.