So I've Heard

In his sweat-drenched
confessional called Bad Boy of Music, George Antheil allowed as how his discovery of the music of the future came to him in a dream. Acting upon his visions, he abandoned his comfortable Trenton, New Jersey, home, caught the next boat for Europe, and set about demolishing pianos to the delight of cultural nabobs in the major capitals. The time was the early 1920s; an American composer with exotica in his luggage – a Sonate Sauvage or an Airplane Sonata – was sure to draw crowds. (Last week’s Antheil jamboree at LACMA delivered the curious information that he still does.) Antheil, in 1922, was young and, I gather, rather pretty; he was handed around among the Virgil Thomson crowd, the Gertrude Stein crowd, the Jean Cocteau crowd. Ezra Pound wrote an adoring monograph about his music, which I tried to read once but gave up on after a sugar reaction set in.

Antheil’s noise piece, the Ballet Mécanique, had earned a mix of épater le bourgeois and flop in Paris and New York; so did a later series of indefinable attempts at pursuing the chimera of the “music of the future.” He died in 1959, leaving behind a quantity of undistinguished Hollywood scores (one of which, a clip from The Pride and the Passion, was an embarrassing addition to the LACMA program), but also a trunkload of unpublished material to which later generations of Antheil mythologists have attached the romantic epithet “lost.” Charles Amirkhanian, one of my successors as music director of KPFA in Berkeley and ardent supporter of losing causes, co-wrote the Antheil entry in Grove’s Dictionary (and stands up as well for Alan Hovhaness). The latest tub-thumper is the pianist Guy Livingston, whose visits to LACMA’s Monday Evening Concerts have been eccentric enough in their own right, if you remember his recital of “60 one-minute compositions” a couple of years ago. His recent night of “lost George Antheil” was weirder by far.

For one thing, the program was clothed in a dramatic context: Livingston in 1920s shabby-genteel getup, typing away on a Bad Boy manuscript and reading therefrom in a tremulous tone no match for the rampant egotism of the text. Then he played music, painfully protracted excerpts from “lost sonatas” 3 and 5, which moseyed on and on with no shape or sense of direction. Were they beginnings? Endings? Random pages fished out of “rejects” bins? There was no way of knowing, and no reason for wanting to know. This was an awful concert; inexplicably, it drew one of LACMA’s largest Monday Evening Concert audiences.

The audience the next night, at Zipper Concert Hall, was far smaller, the rewards far greater. Leonard Stein, gray eminence and one of five co-founders of the excellent Piano Spheres series, has earned a distinguished retirement; his place on the series this year was taken by the splendid young pianist (and, if you care, former ophthalmologist) Scott Dunn, with a visionary and varied program that included one masterwork (Elliott Carter’s 1945 Sonata), one utterly charming non-masterwork (Richard Rodney Bennett’s Noctuary), and some almost-bearable stuff by Chopin and Lukas Foss. In a time when we are beset with young, emergent performers of limited repertory delivered with unlimited flamboyance, Scott Dunn’s concert was exceptional in a number of agreeable ways.

What bright, eloquent music, that tidy, two-movement work by the 37-year-old Carter! The Sonata belongs in “early” Carter, but already there is his striking use of sonority and resonance – not merely as sound but as something to be composed with – that gets tangled up with all the rest of his abstruse workmanship later on. The final jazzy fugue is, would you believe, delightful, a word I use with Carter’s music only with great caution. The Sonata runs 25 minutes; I would gladly have heard it twice, at the sacrifice of Lukas Foss’ nattering, minimalist–rip-off Solo for Piano. (Did Foss ever write anything of his own?) Rodney Bennett’s Noctuary was another kind of delight, an essay on Scott Joplin’s winsome Mexican serenade called Solace (you heard it in The Sting) that floats through the musical language, acquires harmonic complications along its way, climaxes as an unlikely essay in 12-tone, then wafts back to Scott Joplin’s earth.

Back on that earth, there were also some most welcome British visitors, Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir and his “Revolutionary and Romantic” Orchestra, serenading a Royce Hall crowd (plus far too many empty seats) with glorious, sharp-edged Handel, Haydn and Mozart. The Haydn was the Lord Nelson Mass of 1798, arguably the finest of the Austrian master’s choral works. The performance was somewhat compromised: Winds were used rather than the massive summonings of a proper organ, but the famous outlines of Gardiner’s clear, classic points of view were there to be observed and admired. (For that matter, the entire evening was somewhat compromised by the lack of proper promotion and by the lack of printed text handouts. Has UCLA Live stopped caring about its serious musical offerings? This program, and last month’s by the Tallis Scholars, ranked among the town’s best-kept secrets, or so you’d think by the paltry crowds.)

For those of us there, it was a splendid evening, ennobled by Sir John’s individual sensibility, and by the rich, balanced sound of the vocal ensemble – 24 strong – and in the individual excellence of an angelic young soprano whose name, Angharad Gruffydd-Jones, is only the least diverting of her qualities. It began royally, with Zadok, the Priest, one of Handel’s grandest coronation anthems, brought on with the blazing brass of long, natural trumpets and the great Handelian counterpoints that melt into hallelujahs once all the voices are safely tucked in. A Mozart Vesper Service (K. 339) came next, velvety, deep music on its own, its piety nicely squared off until about two-thirds in, when a stupendous fugue takes shape on the same subject that will later serve as the “Kyrie” in the Requiem, which served Handel as “And with His stripes” in Messiah and Bach as Fugue VIII in Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier. How small the world!

I suppose I should write about Esa-Pekka Salonen’s concert with the orchestra of the Crossroads School at Disney Hall, but there’s a problem. The orchestra is famous and proficient; its program – Haydn, Mozart, Bartók – was well-chosen; it was clear that Salonen had rehearsed them carefully. But the music was heard against a background of noise so continuous – feet stomping against that famously resonant floor, doors slamming constantly during performances, applause at every nook and cranny – that concentration became a matter of service beyond the call. I know good things about the education offered at Crossroads, but a course in concert manners – compulsory for all ticket holders, students, parents and, for all I know, board members – might be a valuable addition to the curriculum.

Photo by Joshua Paul

The Death of Klinghoffer is again before us, insistent, moving, inescapable. Nobody of consequence has ever challenged the intense musical power of John Adams’ opera; within a different dramatic context, absent the outcries of Palestinian terrorists singing so passionately the basis of their hatreds, of their belief that “America is one big Jew,” this opera of 1991 would be everywhere recognized as a dramatic score of foremost quality. Yet the work survives in an aura of hatred. Michael Steinberg’s program note for the original Nonesuch recording of the opera struck an ironically prophetic note: “On whichever date you read these words,” he wrote concerning the tragedy of Leon Klinghoffer, “there will be a new installment in the morning paper.”

Now Klinghoffer has been reborn, in a version that, beyond all previous stagings – and certainly beyond all carefully unstaged concert renditions – creates the best possible context for the work’s greatness. Another irony: Adams and the British filmmaker Penny Woolcock were creating this version in London when the news of 9/11 broke; it took only a moment’s hesitation before the decision was made to continue. The result, which played at last year’s Sundance Festival, is now available on a DVD issued by Decca.

The film offers the strengths of Klinghoffer, by more and by less. “By more” is the fact that the score has been drastically reworked; dramatic reordering has occasioned musical reordering as well, and the results are spellbinding. Much use has been made of news footage: A Palestinian sings of his family’s being dispossessed by new Jewish settlers in 1948, and there are shots to support his words. The passengers aboard the hijacked cruise ship sing of their sufferings of generations past, and shots of Nazi pogroms are intercut. “By less” is a minor deprivation: The opera has been shorn of 20 shearable minutes.

More to the point, the action of the opera itself has been moved onto a plane of reality far away from Peter Sellars’ original, somewhat idealized conception. The murder of the wheelchair-ridden Leon Klinghoffer actually takes place center stage – not offstage, as in Sellars’ version – and then his final tragic invocation, “May the Lord God and His creation,” is sung by his murdered body as it slowly descends through clear Mediterranean waters. Once again, as with the opera since its creation, the eloquent Sanford Sylvan inhabits the personage of the good, tragic Klinghoffer fiber by fiber; no less powerful is the steel-and-granite Marilyn Klinghoffer of Yvonne Howard. Adams himself conducts.

Stunning opera making, stunning moviemaking: I am tempted to regard this remarkable piece of silvery plastic as a major forward step in the dissemination of an artistic commodity through the popular media. The fluidity – the easy transition between the reality of trapped, innocent people on a cruise ship in the hands of equally confused captors and the social forces that have brought them to this point; the transitions as well between these people at this point in their lives, and the state of their lives yesterday and the week before – is an element wedded to film. It is brilliantly managed here.

At the end there is nearly an hour’s worth of auxiliary material, every word of it relevant to the matter at hand, with filmmaker and composer especially inflamed by the splendor of the work they have created. Most moving also are the words of librettist Alice Goodman, whose life has been drastically changed by the fate of Klinghoffer, the citizen and the opera. A “nice Jewish girl from Chicago” in 1991 (with the enormous triumph of the Adams/Sellars Nixon in China to rest upon), she has assumed the brunt of the reproach leveled at Klinghoffer‘s controversial message and stands by her words. Whether because or despite, she has in that time abandoned Judaism and now preaches at an Anglican church in London, to a largely Palestinian congregation. She comes off in the video as someone you’d love to meet, and someone you have to believe.

One no longer looks to the major record labels for the thrill of discovery; the latest withered harvest includes such redundant items as a couple of Rach concertos, a Brahms or two, not one but two boxes of the Beethoven nine and, for leavening, an unspeakable item called The Idiot’s Guide to Classical Music, offering no fewer than 99 Greatest Themes. Who could ask for anything more?

Amid the tired chaff, however, there gleams one item of genuine value and delight, the more so as a brand-new offering from EMI Classics, a label whose main activity these days seems to be living in its own past. In a two-disc set, Michel Plasson conducts the chorus and orchestra from the city of Toulouse in an enchanting collection of choral works by Hector Berlioz, short, mostly unfamiliar, and amazing for their range of subject matter and musical style. Here is Berlioz at 24, inflamed with the Romantic urge, turning cries of “victoire” and “triomphe” into a pageant of the Greeks’ battle for independence. A year later, his pen again catches fire as the dying Orpheus is torn apart by the sex-mad Bacchantes – in a cantata that lost him the Prix de Rome on his first application. By 1830, his adoration of Shakespeare (via the Juliet of Henriette Smithson) has led him to his Symphonie Fantastique, but also to delectable small vocal pieces depicting the death of Ophelia and a fabulously dark-colored Funeral March for Hamlet with wordless chorus. (Those last two works form part of a suite called Tristia – “Sad Things” – which figures on the Philharmonic’s January 22 program.)

These are among the treasures in this new collection, along with a Ballet of the Shades for voices and piano that could be an outtake from the spooks’ celebrations in the Fantastique, and an exquisite setting of a Victor Hugo poem – “Sara at Her Bath” – that shocked Leipzig audiences in 1834. A couple of pompous patriotic pieces – one a memorial to Napoleon, the other to celebrate the opening of France’s first railway line – call forth a more workaday aspect of Berlioz’s writing, the work of a man who did not always eat as well as he wished. To the well-planned anniversary celebrations hereabouts of this hard-to-define French genius, such a marvelous disc release is a valuable adjunct; it spreads, far wider than we might have previously realized, our estimate of the breadth of his vision.

In Glendale’s Alex Theater on a Saturday night in late September, the voice of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson soared upward on a jagged trajectory laid down by Johann Sebastian Bach. “Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut,” she sang, and the heart’s blood of an adoring capacity audience throbbed in concordance. Bach’s symbol-laden cantata texts demand a certain forbearance from today’s listeners, but the passionate groveling of his repentant sinner took place beyond the power of words in the fire-scorched dark hues of his recitative and in the incandescence of the singer who gave them shape on this occasion – the season’s opening concert by Jeffrey Kahane’s Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Hunt Lieberson is our sovereign singer – for the mahogany-rich seamlessness of her voice, the intelligence in her use of it over a remarkably wide repertory. I heard her on that occasion on my first night out after spinal surgery, but that is only part of the reason she heads my list of last year’s fondest memories. Fortunately, I have her Nonesuch disc of the same Bach cantata (one of two, actually), so I can relive the miracle of that night even with my own scars practically healed.

Earlier last year she had also sung – with comparably heated powers of communication – in the Philharmonic’s production of John Adams’ El Niño. The work’s imperfections lay more in Peter Sellars’ cluttered visuals than in Adams’ music, whose moments of affecting simplicity I found greatly touching. Adams’ year has been rich beyond measure: El Niño and two major new works, the 9/11-inspired On the Transmigration of Souls (botched, alas, in its Orange County premiere) and the Disney Hall dedicatory The Dharma at Big Sur. Neither score is top-drawer Adams, but both are infused with the parlay of enormous skill and urgency that has made it possible to welcome in Adams the presence of a composer seriously talented, with something on his mind and the skill to send it forth.

The best new music of the year – to these ears, anyway – was none of the above, however, nor is it as yet available. The name of Unsuk Chin gradually makes its way; her Violin Concerto was due for a hearing by Kent Nagano’s Berkeley Symphony but had to be canceled because of the illness of its soloist – Viviane Hagner, the sole master (so far) of its excruciating demands. Meanwhile, the work has gone on to win the University of Louisville’s $200,000 Grawemeyer Award, and a disc of a performance from the Berlin premiere (also with Nagano) has fallen into a few fortunate hands. It is a work of dazzling power, a startling mix of angry, almost brutal rhetoric and elegant, lyric humor. Its composer, 42 years old, born in Korea, will be at Ojai this summer – not with the Violin Concerto but with a new work – and word circulates of a commission from the Los Angeles Opera for 2005.

The best sound of the year – I report with relief shared by, I am sure, millions – came first with the burnished clarity of the intertwined winds at the start of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, followed soon after by the centuries-deep resonance of the bass drum, all of these sounds new and unheard in the Philharmonic’s previous excursions through this score. Yes, there are glitches in certain aspects of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, as it amused me to list in this space a couple of weeks ago; some are reparable with Band-Aids applied to the hall, others with Band-Aids applied to audience behavior. None of these stands in any way in opposition to the overall sight and sound of our new hall, a gigantic step forward in the annals of serious-music consumership.

William Bolcom’s enormous setting (choruses, orchestras and combos, varied soloists) of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience was completed in 1981 and has taken this long to reach our shores. It did so earlier last year, in a distinguished performance by Carl St. Clair and the Pacific Symphony, with auxiliary forces that included Bolcom’s wife, the wonderful song stylist Joan Morris. As in the poetry itself, not everything works in Bolcom’s three-hour score; what does work – the ferocious, bone-chilling setting of “Tyger, tyger burning bright” for one – is great, imaginative, American music making. Why is there no recording?

Another mixed grill, and a delightful one, marked Michael Milenski’s farewell to the Long Beach Opera he had launched 25 years ago. This was a set of seven tiny operas – ranging from Darius Milhaud’s delectable Opéras-Minutes, teensy satires of Greek myths, all the way back to a Monteverdi cycle on Death. As usual at Long Beach, it added up to an afternoon of expectations tickled, fulfilled and thwarted, diverting at every turn. Michael’s successor, Andreas Mitisek, has already proved himself as a conductor with the company; filling Milenski’s boots, however, will leave him with – oops! – his hands full.

To sample the joys of vivid imagination, we look to the Long Beach Opera, to the members of the California EAR Unit, and to the concerts scattered hither and yon (but never yawn) in MaryAnn Bonino’s Chamber Music in Historic Sites. The latter two met enchantingly one Sunday afternoon, in the old freight yard now occupied by SCI-Arc, the forward-looking architecture school, whose premises were filled that day with a nostalgic event by the EAR people – nostalgia in this case being a program carved out of the dust of the 1970s with, as a typical madcap touch, printed programs distributed as paper airplanes.

To LACMA came music making of sterner stuff, three programs in January by Stuttgart’s Neue Vocalsolisten that included two chunks of dark and rarefied atmosphere from the recent past: Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung and the late Luciano Berio’s A-Ronne: music you had to take home and relive in a private room, music that explores the far reaches of the drama inherent within (and even behind) the spoken word. From Stuttgart also came the mysterious and disturbing stage magician Achim Freyer, whose previous L.A. Opera stint had been a destruction of Bach’s B-minor Mass, but who then atoned last September with a season-opening Damnation of Faust that bespangled Berlioz’s flamboyant oratorio with lights, shadows and a torrent of theatrical brilliance that accorded note for note with the tortured genius of the work itself. That one company could, as successive offerings, put forth the genius of this theatrical mastery and the abject nonentity of the misconceived Nicholas and Alexandra – well, there’s the miracle of opera for you.

1 Footsteps on Disney Hall’s balcony stairs: They clatter, they clomp, and musicians onstage have been known to complain out loud. Berlin Philharmonic violinists, over on stage left, could be seen mocking the noisemaking before the start of one of their recent concerts here. Wanna bet they don’t do that in Berlin?

2 Want some real sound? Arrive early and drive down to Level 4 of the parking garage when it’s still fairly empty, and slam your door really hard. The echo – 10 seconds’ duration at the very least – will knock your socks off. Come back again, with drums and a tuba, and have a ball.

3 The rows in the “Orchestra East” and “West” sections taper off at the top to a single seat. Getting into that top seat demands a contortionist’s skill far beyond duty’s call.

4 So does making your way into any seat in the top balcony, an area made further dangerous by an impossibly steep rake, a front rail much too low, and the elevator that stops one floor below.

5 Compared to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion’s generous layout, the creature spaces at Disney do tend to be somewhat cramped. Pushing into a row takes its toll upon the knees; the up-and-down aisles were certainly not planned with social gatherings in mind. One remembers the disaster of a few years ago, when the Philharmonic moved its chamber-music series over to the misshapen new hall at the Skirball Center and was then obliged, by audience protest, to return to its former site at the Gindi Auditorium (losing many subscribers in the process). The Philharmonic may not be obliged to return to the Pavilion anytime in this millennium, but there are the wounded spirits and sore knees to mark the ongoing tight straits even so.

6 To say nothing of (ugh!) the garish new upholstery.

7 The stage floor on the right, where the cellos sit – announced as being hard oak but obviously something much softer – has already become so pitted by those instruments’ spikes that, a Philharmonic official told me recently, it has been slated for replacement. At Zipper Hall, across the street, cellists are forbidden to use spikes; there are other anchoring devices that work just as well.

8 Not all the news is bad. On December 8, in the small café at REDCAT, that haven of computerized wizardry downstairs from Disney, the electronic cash register had broken down, and the coffee was free.

9 An independent environmental study has come up with the information that the average temperature in the Disney Hall area in the afternoon, when the stainless steel of the building reflects the sun, is 10 degrees higher than before its construction. (Expect perfection of no one, says a recent Chinese cookie; even the sun has its spots.)

10 A guard on duty in the garden tells me that this has been a continued success, that crowds push into the lovely space practically all day. They come to admire the lavish plantings, but when darkness falls, you can also watch the crowds drift toward the garden’s west wall to watch the comings and goings in the top-floor apartments of the Promenade Condominiums across Hope Street. After all, Frank Gehry did describe Disney Hall as a living room for the city.

Little Joe’s mother is sick, but there’s no money for milk. Joe and his friend Annette go to the village square to sing for money, but that annoys Brundibár, the town minstrel. He drowns them out with a loud song. With the help of the Cat, the Bird and the Dog, Joe and Annette muster the village children, who defeat the minstrel and save the Mother. Curtain.

That’s not much, as opera plots go, but the history of Brundibár itself, which I saw performed by a bunch of exuberant kids at Santa Monica’s Miles Memorial Playhouse a couple of Fridays ago, is better yet. Its composer, Hans Krása, created the short opera in Prague in 1938, for the children of a Jewish orphanage. Came the Nazi takeover, and the establishment of the concentration camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt) as a showcase to prove to the outside world that Hitler’s thugs did indeed care for the arts. Krása led 55 performances of Brundibár at Terezín, including one before a visiting Red Cross commission, and one that was filmed and circulated in a documentary about those lovely, art-loving Nazis. Soon thereafter, Krása was dragged off to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. In addition to the opera, his name survives in a small repertory of chamber and vocal works, some of them composed during his years of imprisonment.

Brundibár arrived here garlanded in publicity, but it turns out to be a slight work, its harmonies nicely spiced with a touch of Weill/Hindemith, its tunes obviously the work of a man who knew how to make young singers and their audiences feel good – which this ensemble certainly did, thanks to Eli Villanueva’s staging and Daniel Faltus’ musical direction. This was the latest production of Opera Camp, a project now 3 years old, a partnership of the Los Angeles Opera and the Madison Project of Santa Monica College, with additional collaboration this time from the Museum of Tolerance and Santa Monica’s Miles Memorial Playhouse. The value of such a project should be obvious every time you face another snoozing, doddering operatic audience at the Music Center.

One further aspect of this particular event moved me deeply: Next to me at the Miles Playhouse sat a lady by the name of Ela Weissberger, smiling and giving off waves of pride. It turned out that she had been the Cat in 1944 performances of Brundibár at Terezín (including the one on film). Imagine! Imagine the memories this glorious old person can wear like a bright medallion! Mrs. Weissberger immigrated to the U.S. shortly after WWII and now lives in my old stomping ground, New York’s Rockland County. (The Nazi-made film of Terezín’s children, including a scene from Brundibár with Ela Weissberger, has been incorporated into Prisoner of Paradise, Malcolm Clarke and Stuart Sender’s new documentary on the treacherous charms of Terezín. It opens here in late January.)

So there we were, this authentic piece of history and my humble self, side by side, schmoozing about the 76 House and the Community Market and Mr. Hitler. Tell me I don’t have the world’s best job!

Clarinet, violin, cello, piano: It’s an attractive combination, and you’d automatically assume the presence of a large romantic repertory for such a combo – Schumann, surely, and Hummel and Spohr. But no; my search of Grove’s Dictionary yields nothing. The brave young ensemble called Antares (a large red star in Scorpio) must seek its repertory in the present and the as-yet-unwritten. Another group of similar constitution – Tashi, whose members included Peter Serkin and Richard Stoltzman – has come and gone, leaving some impressive footsteps for Antares to follow. If it’s as good as it sounded at its debut concert at LACMA last week, that shouldn’t be a problem.

Antares drew a large and friendly crowd, much of it drawn from the past and present student body at Crossroads, that superior private high school with one of the best music programs in town; the group’s pianist, Eric Huebner, is a Crossroads product, and still something of a local hero for some bright and ballsy music making while he was still a student. Now the group – whose other members are violinist Vesselin Gellev, cellist Rebecca Patterson and clarinetist Garrick Zoeter – has been pulling down residencies and prizes all over the map and eliciting the beginnings of a repertory of its own.

Charles Wuorinen’s Tashi filled most of the first half of the program, music written and named for the previous ensemble. I’ve nurtured an ongoing admiration for Wuorinen’s music, with its high quotient of braininess. But if I needed an East Coast paradigm to illustrate why I’m happier on the West Coast, this very correct, very complicated, intricate music would do just fine. I just can’t write about this music anymore; you can kick a dead cat for just so long. The program’s second half had newer music and newer ideas. Antares is a lively bunch; the free swing of Kevin Puts’ Simaku and a lovable James Matheson trifle called Buzz brought things to life on both sides of the stage. It wasn’t all fluff, either; a long, haunting, jazz-tinted piece called Exil by a Stuttgart composer named Volker David Kirchner evoked the spirits of Bartók and Miles Davis along its expressive path.

It had been nearly 20 years since local-born Michael Tilson Thomas last conducted the local orchestra. His behavior on the Philharmonic podium in his last appearances here – not easily forgotten, including a version of the “Eroica” best described as “bratty” – had brought down management’s wrath, and deservedly so. As a vehicle for riding back into the affections of the hometown folks, he chose curiously: Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, of all the Viennese master’s off-putting works the one most hopelessly awash in pure Weltkvetsch.

In those 20 years away, most of them spent sopping up adoration in the community he was put on Earth to serve, the Tilson Thomas legend has grown to resemble the exact size and shape of San Francisco itself. The two elements were inseparable in the Mahler: a flamboyant opportunism that paid little heed to such matters as musical form and narrative, but feasted blatantly and gorgeously upon every disconnected moment. Since the matter at hand was a work of exasperating prolixity and – especially in its final half-hour (or was it half a day?) – of ugliness difficult to match anywhere in the symphonic repertory, the exercise left the world no worse off than before. Bad music, badly chosen and performed no better than it deserved: It was the same old MTT; you’d know him anywhere.

The year was 1978, and while some guys on Sunset were concocting the prototype of the paper you now hold, I was 2,500 miles away, holding down the classical-music gig at New York magazine and convinced that life held no fairer prize. Came a bloke named Dick Houdek with an invitation, plus plane ticket, to a place called the California Institute of the Arts, which was about to stage its first Contemporary Music Festival. The students at CalArts, Dick told me as a kind of lure, had recently staged a rally at the school, boycotting a baroque-music concert with signs reading, WE WANT NEW MUSIC. This, I decided, I gotta see.

CalArts in 1978, like CalArts today, was indeed that kind of place. That “new-music festival” was crammed with composers from the school, such as the electronic pioneers Morton Subotnick and Mel Powell (who had once, at 17, been Benny Goodman’s piano man), and other Californians, including a lively contingent from the University of California at San Diego. Over four days, practically around the clock, I heard the requisite quotient of modern-day masterpieces: works by the late Earle Brown, who had terrorized New York audiences a few years back; Stockhausen’s Mantra, in an amazingly assured student performance.

But the bulk of the festival was given over to truly new music and to musical sounds mostly unfamiliar – electronic sounds, percussion ensembles carrying on in the John Cage/Lou Harrison tradition, familiar instruments used in unfamiliar ways – by composers many of whose names were also mostly unfamiliar: Roger Reynolds, Virko Baley, Wilbur Ogdon, Harold Budd. Most of it, furthermore, was good; some of it was extraordinary; some was worthless, as runs the average in life itself. The feeling emerged, however, that I had ventured upon a musical world inadequately recognized or credited outside the walls of CalArts. I was obsessed in two opposite directions: to get back to New York and tell everybody about what I’d been hearing, and to stay on and continue to wallow in it.

New York had just cloned itself with a West Coast counterpart called New West, and we cooked up a deal wherein, for a year, I’d become the world’s first bicoastal classical-music critic, covering the scene on both coasts on alternate fortnights and finding someone in California to anoint for the job after I left. (I interviewed Mark Swed, and can’t remember now why I didn’t hire him.) After that year, of course, I’d return to my senses and to the real world.

During that year I lived pretty well, on the company’s due bills at the Beverly Wilshire and the St. Francis, and continued my astonished discovery of California’s music. I was naturally curious as to why a composer with the chops to make it in the real world – Subotnick, for example – would prefer a life on this side of the mountains. “That’s easy,” said Subotnick in 1978. “Nobody reads the West Coast critics. Everybody knows they’re hostile to all new music, so it doesn’t matter what they write.” “West Coast critics” meant, above all, the acid-penned Martin Bernheimer of the L.A. Times, who after 13 years had still not forgiven Los Angeles for failing to have metamorphosed into Vienna under his stern guidance, and who had suffered the worst fate to befall anyone in this line of work – predictability.

At San Diego I heard half-hour pieces for nothing but cymbals, and pieces for “extended voices” that required singers to build on techniques best known from the “throat singing” of Tibetan monks. The great old composer Robert Erickson, one of the most influential teachers I’ve ever known, played me tapes of natural sounds – waves, Sierra brooklets – that he had retuned through recycled coffee cans; you couldn’t get more Californian than that. At Stanford’s computer-music labs in 1979, I sat in on the day-by-day creation of a mixed-media piece that involved drummers, a belly dancer, digitally processed howling (by the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir) and much else culled from a brave new electronic world that I will never understand but always marvel at. The composer, Janis Mattox, accessed a large roomful of equipment through a bank of keyboards and drew her sounds out of loudspeakers the approximate height of elephants. Nowadays you do it with laptops.

My time was up. During that year I had produced three public-radio series (including one on why West Coast composers were different from anyone else). I had been invited to teach criticism at CalArts and USC. I had been pulled unconscious from a burning car and, out of a need to show off my tan on my trips to New York, been operated on for skin cancer. I had, in other words, become a Californian, and in record time. It would have been foolish to go back. I’m still here.

TO ALL THAT OPULENCE on view at Disney Hall, REDCAT is the perfect counterbalance. Nobody cares about the acoustics, since most of its music is miked. Nobody cares about the look of the place, since its 200-seat space is infinitely adjustable. You don’t begrudge Walt Disney his kazillion-dollar entry to high culture through Frank Gehry’s fabulous doorway upstairs. But REDCAT – whose name stands for Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater – transports us in spirit to Walt in his workshop in the 1920s, roughing out the early adventures of Oswald the Rabbit, hobnobbing with the likes of Salvador Dali, learning firsthand about hunger pangs. The first few nights of REDCAT’s “official” opening were nicely planned (as had been Disney Hall’s upstairs): retrospectives of electronic music from CalArts founding father Mort Subotnick and of Walt’s early cartoons, a night with CalArts’ current new-music ensemble: no masterpieces, but good energy.

There’s an interesting turnaround here. When Disney’s dream of a school for all the arts materialized in the underpopulated spaces of 1969 Valencia, its first generations of students placed high value on the isolation of the place – someplace to drop in and drop out, when such things were important. Now the emphasis has apparently shifted toward this downtown beachhead; certainly the performance schedule over the next few months – one “creative music festival” after another, jazz from Anthony Braxton, Scottish marching bands, multimedia artists, our own EAR Unit (itself a CalArts offshoot) honoring founding father Mel Powell, something called “Plunderphonics” with someone called John Oswald – sets up a whole new contemporary force in our midst. Will CalArts itself follow this southward tidal wave? When you ponder the relative value of all that tracted land around Valencia compared to 1969’s wide-open spaces, you can’t help wondering.

What I like most about REDCAT, in fact, is its success in transplanting that “drop in, drop out” message right into downtown – a counterpart to Mrs. Disney’s 24/7 garden upstairs. There’s a café with good coffee, an art show, daytime musical and performance events that seem to take shape spontaneously, some video now and then, even a bookstore – tiny, but intelligently stocked. All this, plus MOCA across the street.

UPSTAIRS, as if to carry on this catalog of miracles, there was Pierre Boulez last week to lead the Philharmonic in agonizing, deeply probing music: the first movement of the 10th Symphony that Mahler had left unfinished, and the second act of the Parsifal that was Wagner’s most disturbed music drama – not a program for the insecure of faith. Set against this was the further miracle of Boulez himself, whose interpretive art deepens and haunts the memory even as his presence on the podium in recent years becomes the more abstract. The most important musician of his time, he seems obsessed with embodying the essence of that time in the simplest, most rational terms. On Friday night he and his orchestra had sought out, and revealed in full glory, the lyric essence of the German Romantic line – the single line from which the Mahler adagio departs and to which it makes its pain-racked return, the coiling, dangerously expanding complex of lines with which Wagner nails our stupefied souls, each of us, to our own cross. The emotion this night, further lit in the audible flames from the driven, inspired orchestra (and the vocal ensemble led by Willard White’s searing Klingsor), was as intense as any audience should be asked to endure fully clothed.

Earlier last week, Disney’s other resident ensemble announced its arrival, as Grant Gershon and the Master Chorale reminded us, via John Adams’ Harmonium, how long this excellent composer has been in our midst. Adams has traveled great distances since 1981, and the occasional rough-cut passages here, the minimalist patches that seem patchier than a later Adams might countenance, draw an indulgent smile. Our gratitude to Gershon for reviving this edgy masterpiece is unbounded, especially so in the context of a choral concert rather than a symphonic event. Audiences for choral concerts tend toward conservatism. Tune in, as I did this last time, on conversations among clumps of church organists; you can wonder if you’re listening on the same planet. The diapason crowd surely must have found greater surcease in the pretty, overstuffed but basically small-scale pieces Bobby McFerrin had composed for the group; Gershon was right to perform them, but he was on even firmer ground in scheduling the Adams. Right on, Grant!

IN AS MANY PERFORMANCES of Orfeo ed Euridice as I’ve succumbed to in six or so decades of operagoing – a dozen, maybe – it has never occurred to me to look upon Gluck’s sovereign score as dull, or unbalanced, or anything but noble and generally uplifting. It has taken our local forces to instill those other points of view, which it now has, I’m sorry to say, in the production currently at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (through December 21). I find it a bane to the eye, an insult to most other senses (including common). The crowd on opening night, honor bids me report, cheered – not loudly, but cheered nonetheless.

The opera exists in two basic versions. The first, in Italian, was performed in Vienna in 1762. The second, in French, was given in Paris in 1774. The common version today is a conflation of the two, sung in Italian but with the changes and additions of the French version. Reverting to the 1762 version, as was done here, deprives us of many cherishable details large and small: Euridice’s sublime Elysian aria, and most of the Elysian ballet, including the D-minor solo for flute that has been reckoned the most beautiful melody ever composed for that instrument. (In the Cocteau Orphée, it’s the tune that comes over the car radio.)

The pangs of deprivation are deep. They are deepened by the absurdity of the production, in which a blank frame-shaped structure lumbers up and down on the stage, obscuring the feet of Lucinda Childs’ dancers and setting up nonsensical barriers. Vivica Genaux, the Orfeo, wears a tieless tux and a floor-length coat, looks like a young Tom Cruise, but lacks the body in her voice to fill in the role. (The sublime Kathleen Ferrier recordings have just been reissued on London.) Maria Bayo, the Euridice, chirps prettily in the few scraps of the score left to her; so, with an even smaller plateful of scraps, does Carmen Giannattasio as Amor, God of Love. Both are wasted on this trivial evening, as was I.

Photo by Alan Wood

“ISN’T THIS A DREADFUL
orchestra?” said Simon Rattle, curly-topped, dimpled, transfixingly blue-eyed – not yet “Sir” – over cups at a downtown coffee den. The year was 1981, and he had just been made principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic; a year before, he had taken over the City of Birmingham Orchestra, with which, he promised, he would wipe the Los Angeles, and most other orchestras, off the map. I teased him about being stuck with an orchestra in the British boonies, and he flew into a rage. “You don’t know anything, do you?”

He calmed down, and we discussed the road ahead of him. Since he had grown up as a percussionist, and only recently come to conducting, there were still great chunks of the symphonic repertory he didn’t know, including many of the Beethoven symphonies. Even so, he had already made a splash back home with recordings of gritty contemporary British works that nobody else wanted to touch: symphonies by Peter Maxwell Davies, for example. He knew, about himself, that he was a quick study. I don’t remember ever meeting anyone quite so justifiably self-confident as the very young (26) Simon Rattle that afternoon.

Ernest Fleischmann, an absolute genius at spotting and grabbing raw talent, had fixed his eye on Simon Rattle when the 21-year-old whizbang had come to the Hollywood Bowl leading an orchestra of British schoolkids back in ’76. After 1981, despite Rattle’s professed contempt for the local players, his name showed up frequently on the Philharmonic schedule, joined a couple of years later by another Fleischmann acquisition,
Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Rattle was mentioned now and then as the logical successor to Carlo Maria Giulini after that great man’s retirement in 1985, but Rattle knew what he was doing. He returned to Birmingham, wangled a great new concert hall out of the city, and filled it with a world-class, no-longer-boonie orchestra.

And look at him now. Look at him, on the podium that once belonged to Arthur Nikisch, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan. Look at him, ensconced in the concert hall – Berlin’s Philharmonie – whose outlines and acoustic design the Los Angeles planners freely admit to have cribbed from in planning our own great new venue. Look at him this past weekend, with the honorific “Sir” now affixed, escorting his very own Berlin Philharmonic through two programs of music-making eloquent, exquisite, enterprising and sometimes still whizbang, before sellout crowds at the highest ticket price ($17 o5) of any Disney Hall event (except for the black-tie galas, of course) this season.

Was it worth the price? You betcha! Just that delicate, floating pianissimo that began Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta last Friday night was worth the price, even with the cruel punctuation from the uncontrolled cougher in, I would guess, M-130 of the Upper Orchestra (yes, the acoustics are that good). That performance – the one on the stage, that is – was pure virtuosity, every contrapuntal line etched in exact detail, the exuberant propulsion of the music in beautiful balance. The Schubert Ninth suffered somewhat from that same exuberance, most of all from an excess of roogie-roogie from the trombones. My way of hearing that noble, majestic music is from the Berlin Philharmonic of another era – December 1951, in Berlin’s Church of Jesus Christ, under Furtwängler (still on D.G.); eheu, fugaces labuntur anni.

Saturday afternoon’s concert was more of the same: its money’s worth in even more glowing measure. A Haydn symphony began it (No. 88, full of jokes and full of love); Debussy’s La Mer ended it, its extroverted gorgeousness a magic that you could touch. Both performances, I suspect, will remain my way of hearing those two works for quite some time. In the middle there was new music by France’s Henri Dutilleux, composed for Rattle and the orchestra (and for Dawn Upshaw, who, being indisposed, was handsomely replaced by Valdine Anderson). The music, Correspondances, was a series of settings of mystical texts by letter-writers (among them Rilke, van Gogh, Solzhenitsyn) lasting about 20 minutes. I have had trouble with Dutilleux’s music in the past, and did so again; I respect his 87 years, but find nothing from them that speaks to me; the new songs come across in many shades of gray – so gray, in fact, that the Sibelius Seventh Symphony, the next work on the program, simply throbbed with color. Coals to Newcastle: Rattle performing Sibelius in Salonen precincts did seem to find greater warmth in the music, without necessarily improving the result.

LATER THAT DAY, across the street at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and at a top ticket 5 bucks less than for the Berlin, the Los Angeles Opera came up with a Lucia di Lammermoor respectable at all times and sometimes genuinely splendid. The star is Anna Netrebko, the Russian coloratura soprano who has been eating up opera houses on both coasts since her San Francisco Opera debut in 1995. She is wondrous to look at (“Audrey Hepburn with a voice,” reads one spumaceous e-mail), and generates PR the way Vesuvius generates lava (did you know she once washed floors for a living?); better yet, she sang a first-rate Lucia, tragic in the tragic moments, horrifying in the mad moments, stupendous in the high-E moments. Surrounding her was a production of above-average resource both musical and dramatic, with sure and affectionate pacing from veteran conductor Julius Rudel and an intelligent frame for the action created by Marthe Keller. Vitalij Kowaljow is the resonant, sympathetic Raimondo; Jose Bros the somewhat reedy Edgardo who drew the loudest cheers for some reason. I have a theory: Tenors have the largest families.

Yes, I had a couple of reservations. Lucia is part of a repertory that has become fair game for music editors, who hide behind a pretense of scholarly authenticity with one hand, and go snip snip snip with the other: a second stanza dropped here, a repeat or a cadence formula dropped there. Just in Lucia‘s opening scene, the complex of arias that proceeds from “Regnava Nel Silenzio” and ends with the duet with Edgardo that is on every Italian barrel-organ, I kept hearing the snip of the editor’s scissors. The more this repertory becomes known – through enlightened performances and dozens of recordings – the more audible, and therefore the more painful, these minor surgeries become. All told, they don’t remove more than, say, 10 minutes from the complete score, yet you feel their pain, their drip, drip . . .

The most beautiful sound I have yet heard at Disney Hall was the dark-blue/violet invocation from James Rotter’s alto saxophone that began Darius Milhaud’s La création du monde at last week’s Philharmonic program: throbbing, mysterious, hall-filling yet seeming to rise from far reaches. The ugliest sound came just before: last-minute arrivals pounding their way to their seats across drumlike floor spaces in a percussive sequence that has become the hall’s most noticeable defect – and a considerable one. Last week’s conductor, David Robertson, was obliged to remark (quite audibly, of course) on the intrusion, as had Keith Jarrett at the start of his jazz concert two nights before. The defect is reparable – in the structure of the hall itself, by an extensive program of audience intimidation or by both – but no purpose is served by pretending it doesn’t exist.

Historically and artistically, Milhaud’s 80-year-old score is a remarkable work; it is hard to believe that this was its first complete Philharmonic performance. I would have thought that Otto Klemperer, who plunged deeply into the rising tide of jazz awareness, would have championed it during his time here. In 1923, Milhaud had returned to Paris with armloads of records purchased at Harlem shops, infatuated with the new jazz consciousness and the companionate passion for African-inspired cubism in painting and sculpture. Cubism’s Fernand Léger designed the sets for his new jazz ballet; it told the Creation story through African eyes and African movements. To a Paris rattled by the comparable primitivism of Stravinsky’s Sacre, still echoing a mere 10 years later, La création provided a glorious aftershock.

Under the remarkable Robertson’s leadership the other night, its solo colors so vividly put forward in these new surroundings, La création had nothing of the relic quality it can easily display. Sure, some of its cadence-formulas are pure Mickey Mouse, the same way Hamlet can be full of old quotations if you let it be. What I heard from this performance, however, was the picture of a composer just past 30, caught up in the discovery of a new musical language and full of delight as he twists this resource one way and another, coming up with a wonderfully weird, fresh, one-of-a-kind masterpiece.

Robertson, Santa Monica born, is an appealing, considerably talented conductor who needs to be kept in mind when matters of podium succession come under discussion. A protégé of Pierre Boulez for several years, he chose Bartók’s The Wooden Prince to fill out his program here – worth noting, since Boulez had conducted it with the Philharmonic in 1987. I remember that performance as small-scale, even dull; this one was neither. (Can such things be?) One major difference was the presence, this time, of running supertitles to detail the complications of Béla Balázs’ folktale plot for the original ballet, which, in true mittel-Europäisch fashion, has its principals dying, resurrecting, falling in and out of love, cutting off and restoring their own hair, while the forests around them surge and wither – all over nearly an hour’s time span. You can see why a supertitle or two might come in handy.

This is early Bartók. Its dates are 1914–17, but the shadows that fall across it are more of Strauss than Stravinsky. Its orchestra is huge, and managed with great facility; however, though you can hear an occasional wisp of a folk tune, it is difficult to glean the outline of the later Bartók – even of the startling Miraculous Mandarin of only two years later – from this brightcolored but heavy-lying score.

Midway in this energized program, Emanuel Ax played one of the greatest of Mozart’s late piano concertos, the C-major K. 503 – wise in content (with that magical F-major moment in the finale that I’ve sputtered over many times) and wise in the execution. Oddly, he performed in black tie, with the orchestra, as usual, in white. I asked him about this afterward. “I’ve given up performing in tails,” he said. “Mazel tov,” I answered.

The prospect of yet another Madama Butterfly exerted, at best, a feeble spell, and the recent go-around at Costa Mesa’s Opera Pacific, of a production well-traveled since its debut (at the Houston Grand Opera) in 1998, drew me with halting steps. More’s the surprise, therefore, to report on a powerful – no, make that thrilling, perhaps even enlightening – evening in which Puccini’s saga of hearts athrob achieved its devastating purpose this once, leaving me shaken and convinced against all wisdom that the damn opera is, indeed, some kind of masterpiece.

Francesca Zambello, as is her custom, has raised a certain havoc with the Giacosa/Illica plotline, and some of her conceptions – preserved in Garnett Bruce’s restaging – required looking the other way here and there to blot out certain inconsistencies. The action took place not in a pretty cottage up the hill, but in the office of Consul Sharpless, with scrim walls that vanished at times, and with an American flag (44 stars) and a Pledge of Allegiance (no “under God”). A hubbub at the start (a nice match to the music of the prelude) filled the place with bustling Japanese trying to conduct business, bustling secretaries trying to cope, and bustling flunkies trying to conduct a marriage
of convenience that none of them cares much about.

The tragedy of deep love betrayed by noncommittal game playing emerged from this human mass; even Butterfly‘s heart-rending “Un bel d씝 surfaced on a crowded stage, the suffering solo figure surrounded by uncaring life. A brilliant, frazzled Chinese soprano, Xiu Wei Sun, wound her long, unruly hair around her distress; at her suicide, with the bare stage suddenly flooded in blood-red fabric, the whole of Segerstrom Hall seemed to recoil at the shock. John DeMain conducted; on opening night his orchestra achieved no prodigies of accuracy, but its way of wrapping itself into the human tragedy was something you – meaning I – could strongly share.

Word is out: Opera Pacific, along with many other of our noblest musical institutions, is up against financial distress; its latest deficit report runs to seven figures. The Butterfly was not a lavish production; its almost-bare stage was covered not with expensive scenery, but with people making interesting movements in attractive, naturalistic costumes.

The whole thing, in fact, looked and sounded like the kind of opera that made it easy to believe, to be moved, to weep along.

Photo by Anne Fishbein

FINDING YOUR WAY through the intricate programming of this first Disney Hall season – the “Creation Festival” here, the “Baroque Variations” there, the “Sounds About Town” all over the place – is as challenging a process as finding your way through the hall itself. I note with some amusement the new hand-lettered stickers in the elevators, clarifying that “3” equals “Terrace” or “East Orchestra” or whatever. A troop of Boy Scouts or Saint Bernards, stationed through the corridors, might also be in order.

Last Friday saw the inaugural of “First Nights,” the L.A. Philharmonic’s new series to explain, and then perform, music that ruffled feathers at its inception; Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was the logical choice for starters. Even so, I approached with some trepidation. Harvard’s Dr. Thomas Kelly, whose book gives the series its title, does not inspire my admiration; his book, an avatar of what Virgil Thomson used to call “the music-appreciation racket,” is a slick but unbalanced job. (Imagine, in the discography, a survey of Messiah performances that doesn’t list a single vocalist!) On the Disney stage Prof. Kelly was no less slick and – in his attempt to act out choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky’s ballet steps – no less unbalanced. After this sorry disquisition, however, there came a kind of magic: Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting one of the Rite‘s spectacular outbursts, with a gathering of costumed dancers struggling with the beat, an actor impersonating Nijinsky screaming out numbers and a well-placed claque of vociferous protesters throughout the hall, enacting the famous first-night Paris riot of May 1913 that did, indeed, launch that music’s notoriety.

Not everything worked that well. The assembled actors – as Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, conductor Pierre Monteux – made something of a goulash out of affected accents, and John de Lancie’s narration (of his own text) moved in and out of focus, as is his wont. Mostly, however, the hour’s worth of concocted entertainment led cleverly to the final performance by Salonen and the orchestra – preceded, as it had been on that night in 1913, by the saccharine closing moments of Chopin’s Les Sylphides. That, I needn’t tell you, was the cat’s pajamas.

The program was sold out, with thwarted attendees lined up at the box office. So, in fact, was the first “Green Umbrella” event earlier in the week (with the hall’s stratospheric balcony wisely closed). Think of it: more than 1,900 new-music aficionados at a concert that used to draw something like 400 at its previous venue, across the street at Zipper Hall. The program was hardly condescending: new or almost-new works for single instruments, with or without electronic support, performed by Philharmonic members. Some, not all, was rather wonderful: Thomas Adès’ piano nocturne Darknesse Visible, enchantingly played (at the edge of silence) by Joanne Pearce Martin; David Breidenthal gobble-gobbling his way through a Colin Matthews piece for solo bassoon; concertmaster Martin Chalifour’s spellbinding playing of Salonen’s Laughing Unlearnt, last heard two summers ago at the Ford Amphitheater. The program’s one “classic,” Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint for solo clarinet (Lorin Levee) and eight more on tape, was somewhat misrepresented by the big distance between solo instrument and the taped companions on loudspeakers; the piece relies more, I think, on give-and-take than on wide-open spaces.

TWO WEEKENDS AGO there was Bach aplenty: five concertos by Musica Angelica at Zipper, four more by London’s Academy of Ancient Music at the Queen Mary – a “Historic Site” if ever one was. Michael Eagan’s Musica Angelica has been around for a while, mostly in pleasant, rather informal concerts in churches. Last year it decided to expand – in image if not in numbers; now it is allied with the Colburn School, and has upped its ticket prices accordingly: $47 for the Zipper concert, as opposed to $44 for the Academy on shipboard.

The mathematics did not match the events: the solemn, slogging and sometimes sloppy performances by Eagan’s group, with the three and four harpsichords grinding away like so many sewing machines and the string players dropping notes all over the place. (I except, of course, the eloquent baroque violin of visiting soloist Elizabeth Blumenstock, who rose high above her fellows all evening.) Eagan’s archlute served as continuo in several of the concertos, but did so practically inaudibly (to these ears, anyway, in a seat halfway back in the excellent Zipper) and without anything identifiable as a firm beat. Los Angeles deserves a permanent early-music ensemble, and Angelica has been pushing hard for that kind of recognition, but I didn’t hear playing that night worthy of that status – and certainly not worthy of $47.

From the Academy’s hard-edged Mozart on their Christopher Hogwood discs of the 1980s, I would not have expected the warm, flexible and – yes – humorous performances that made the Sunday drive to Long Beach eminently rewarding. This was a small group from the larger ensemble – eight players, led from Richard Eggar’s harpsichord, and lit from within by the seductive burble of Rachel Brown’s flute (and her piccolo, in the one encore). Nobody has yet come up with a single “definitive” way of performing Bach, and that is just fine. What remains true, however, is the rubric that, however flexible the tempi and the phrasing, however mighty the performing forces, Bach is never dull. Listen to the supreme masterwork on the Academy program, the D-minor keyboard concerto (part of which also served Bach in one of his church cantatas); listen especially to the rhapsody spun forth by the solo harpsichord above the dark menace of the strings in the slow movement. If ever music dug deep into the souls of the listeners, to sing of matters beyond the power of any imagined words, it is in these eight or so minutes of wordless passion. Angelica had played the same music the night before – in the violin-concerto reconstruction – and it was just plain . . . dull.

At LACMA, the New York New Music Ensemble took “Elektro Akoustiks: The New Tradition” to title its local visit, but in a sequence of short works by Jonathan Harvey, Eric Chasalow, Ezequiel Viñao and Mathew Rosenblum, ending with David Felder’s Partial [dist] res[s]toration, I found that the cute orthography far outweighed any strength of spirit in the music, or any joy in performing it. Two nights later, the EAR Unit, with its usual kind of joyous perusal – above all of two strong works by the late (and much-missed) Earle Brown – restored confidence that there is still something to be said these days in music’s varied realms, and still some pleasure in the act of saying it.