So I've Heard

Elliott Carter composed his Night Fantasies in 1980, and entrusted its power to the four pianists who had commissioned it (and later recorded it): Paul Jacobs, Gilbert Kalish, Ursula Oppens and Charles Rosen. Nearly a quarter-century later, this half-hour work maintains that strange power to mirror any performers brave enough to take on – and, if possible, to soar above – its crevasses and crags. On the Internet I found a dissertation on the work by one John F. Link of William Paterson University (www.wpunj.edu/coac/music/

link/sonus/sonuspaper.html); If I didn’t know Dr. Link was writing about music by Elliott Carter, I might take his words as parody of a scholar up to his ears in musical abstruseness. That’s Carter for you.

I do, however, find the Night Fantasies a work of remarkable depth, possibly my favorite music from this prolific composer’s legacy, and Gloria Cheng’s performance at her recent Piano Spheres concert at Zipper Hall reminded me of the music’s wonders. Carter himself writes about the music with unusual warmth (for him, that is); it recalls to his mind the “poetic moodiness” of Schumann, and the comparison is just. Time has not reduced the terrors in the work, and the Cheng performance – broadly expressive, splendidly responsive to the work’s title – was a matter of bravery beyond the call. I hope she records it; from the music’s original dedicatees, only a Rosen performance survives.

Cheng’s program called itself a “Bounty of Birthdays,” and celebrated major anniversaries for Carter (95), John Harbison (65), William Kraft (80) and the late Jacob Druckman (75), as well as for the Piano Spheres series itself (10). The range of styles was, let’s say, interesting, from the pretty colors of Kraft’s Translucences of 1979, to the neoclassic hard lines of Harbison’s 1987 First Piano Sonata, to the charm of a set of Album Leaves by the non–birthday boy Steven Stucky (54). Two short, recent Carter pieces filled out the program, trivial music from a man who has earned the right to nod now and then. Piano Spheres, one of the city’s most distinguished concert series, has not nodded as yet and probably won’t; the next event, a program by Susan Svrcek, is listed for January 14.

Across the street, a few nights later, came the latest in Disney Hall’s baptismal events, its first-ever piano recital, delivered by Evgeny Kissin. At 32 and, thus, no longer the apple-cheeked wunderkind of yore, Kissin remains brave; it is indeed an act of bravery for a young virtuoso, his career nicely anchored among spellbinding performances of Pictures at an Exhibition and the Rach 3, to devote nearly an hour of a recital program to the last of Franz Schubert’s Piano Sonatas, all the repeats in place, sprightly when required. I wish, therefore, that I could report on the event with unmodified rapture.

Overall it was a stupendous concert, made uncommonly generous by a full half-hour of encores no less substantial than the scheduled program (Schubert’s G-flat Impromptu, Liszt’s Soirées de Vienne and one of his Paganini Etudes and on and on). There were, indeed, fine moments in the sonata in unexpected places – that imponderable, jolting turn in the slow movement, for one, where Schubert drops us precipitously, trembling and with hearts afire, from C-sharp minor to C major. The phrasing of the broad, eloquent opening theme – twitchy, uneven and at odds with lyric flow – had led me to expect far worse. Come to think of it, I have yet to hear from a pianist of Russian background – Horowitz, Richter and now Kissin – a Schubert sonata played with comprehension of that astonishing interplay of intimacy and grandeur that sets this music apart on its own pedestal.

As of this writing I have been to four scheduled events at Disney, seated in a different part of the hall each time: high against a side wall in the terrace section, in the front row of the balcony, in an orchestra aisle seat about halfway back and, for the Mahler Second the other night, in an “Orchestra East” seat above the orchestra and over the harps, where Esa-Pekka Salonen and I could, if we had so chosen, play eye games with each other. So far as my aged ears could detect, the differences in sound from one perch to another were negligible; the hall sounds as good as the press department wants me to believe. I would not happily return to that perch in the balcony, however; if I had had to push my way into a center seat, instead of being on the aisle, the narrowness of the space and its height would have brought on an attack of vertigo. Should the Philharmonic really want me up there, let them sponsor a paper-airplane competition, not a concert.

The problems with audience noise remain; the solution will be for the hall itself to instill a sense of awe, delight and pride. It can happen; already the amenities have earned widespread comment. Praise resounds for accessible johns on every floor (except, once again, that awful balcony), escalators to get you there, a handsome bookstore (which still needs to be stocked with merchandise pertinent to the concert at hand), a really splendid small cafeteria (which I mention only hesitantly, for fear of overcrowding) and, above all, the garden with its plantings lit by the smile of Lillian Disney.

The Mahler Second was, to nobody’s surprise, sufficiently off-the-wall to make the music itself seem almost lovable this time around. I find the affection lavished upon this score somewhat ludicrous – whether from Esa-Pekka Salonen, whose performance last week was a marvel of orchestral detail meticulously defined and blended, or from that obsessed New York capitalist Gilbert Kaplan, who buys himself the chance to wave a stick at this music when and wherever he chooses, but conducts nothing else in God’s entire realm. The vast acoustic excellences of Disney Hall make it possible to enhance the dimensionality of the music – the offstage brass and percussion that stop all forward momentum early in the finale, and the uprushing cellos and basses early on. Nobody pays nearly enough attention to the enchanting Schubertian-ness of the slow movement, where Salonen encouraged his elegant violins to turn themselves into inelegant fiddles and dowse the music in giggles and chortles. That, to these ears, is the culmination of the Mahler Second, and the other night it was supergorgeous. The rest was high-class blah.

Consider the irony. In 1940 there was Fantasia, the hat-in-hand appeal by the Walt Disney Studios to secure a blessing from the citadels of High Culture. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was the big number, its 33 minutes hacked down by a third, its sequence of events deranged, its scenario a ludicrous if colorful number involving amoebas, dinosaurs, floods and earthquakes, introduced in Deems Taylor’s patronizing exordium. Stravinsky was, naturally, furious; the names of Walt Disney and classical music would be forever sundered – until last week, when the Walt Disney Concert Hall opened its doors, with Stravinsky’s masterwork – this time integral – again on the agenda.

Another Rite of Spring, a dazzling performance by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, lingered in many ears, many memories. In 1996, Salonen and the Philharmonic had performed it in a three-week Stravinsky Festival at the Thétre du Chtelet in Paris, known for its terrific acoustics and an architecture that put orchestra and audience practically in each other’s laps. A large contingent of Philharmonic board members were on that Paris junket, and when they returned home, they brought the obsession that, come what may, Los Angeles also had the right to hear what its orchestra really sounded like – a privilege denied within the blocky precincts of the Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Ground had already been broken for a new concert hall, designed by Frank Gehry and with acoustic design by Yasuhisa Toyota, but the work had stopped. Now, nothing would do but that the concrete mixers and the welding torches once again be activated. Last week the results of that insistence gave Los Angeles’ musical life – and, for that matter, the nationwide institution of performed classical music, languishing of late – a rebirth whose consequences are exhilarating to contemplate.

Everything – well, almost everything – about that seductive, welcoming room of wood, set within the incandescent curves and sparkles of its lustrous metal wrapping, deserves place in the jubilation. There are, of course, problems; did you ever hear of a new performing space that emerged unbeset by problems the first time out? Salonen and the orchestra have already encountered, and for the most part solved, small matters of echo and dead spots here and there, and the tweaking will go on into the future. In the opening-night gala there were things that didn’t work. I detected serious unbalances as the Master Chorale sang a complex, densely grained work of György Ligeti (the Lux Aeterna, which has also had a movie career, thanks to Kubrick’s 2001). The Gabrieli Canzona for antiphonal brass ensembles might have worked better if some of the players had performed in a balcony area, rather than across the orchestra seating.

But then came the tidy little Mozart symphony (No. 32), with the interplay between winds and strings suspended in midair, the horns and drums resounding like the lights on a distant shore. This was a sound of music you can remember from the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at Royce Hall, or remember more faintly from visiting orchestras at the Ambassador Auditorium, but never in the precincts at First Street and Grand. In the nine minutes of that crystal-textured performance was exemplified every reason for the building of this great new music-space, and every hope for its success. The Stravinsky after intermission carried its own bag of thrills; could anyone hear the rich resonance of Raynor Carroll’s bass drum – or the clamorous interplay of the winds, or the dark mysteries of muted brass – without sending up flares of gratitude to architect and acoustician, and without remembering Paris? By intermission, the dreams of this city’s hopeful concertgoers had already been fulfilled.

Certain other problems may require more imaginative solutions. The very liveness that endows the sounds of music making in the hall also resounds to its detriment. A cough anywhere in the hall, a dropped program or – heaven forfend! – a cell phone is immediately and emphatically audible. So are footsteps on the wood flooring or, worse, on the stairways in the terrace and balcony levels. On the opening nights, the voices of broadcast engineers behind the balcony area also carried throughout the hall. Members of the orchestra have spoken about the problems in getting used to their new performing area; it must also happen that audiences will face these problems. Somewhere in this world, people take off their shoes before entering public spaces.

On the second night the music making was of more challenging mien, although both Salonen’s own LA Variations, which began the program, and Revueltas’ Sensemaya, which ended it, have been elevated to local classics. John Adams’ The Dharma at Big Sur, co-commissioned by the Philharmonic and the Orange County Philharmonic Society, may someday join their ranks. The inspiration is indigenous California, the roadrunner fictions of Jack Kerouac, and the music of Terry Riley and Lou Harrison that stretches out to the harmonies of the Pacific Rim. It’s a strange but appealing work, a minute or two overlong, perhaps. Tracy Silverman, the soloist who belongs among the inspirers, plays a six-string electronic violin into a microphone and into processing circuitry; it gives him the remarkable ability to carry a lyric line all the way from the highest notes of a normal violin down into cello territory. The lines Adams has given him are powerful and seductive; you hear them as a single, nonstop outpouring. Therein lies the Lou Harrison connection.

Having heard another Adams premiere – the intense, harrowing, Pulitzer-winning On the Transmigration of Souls – in Orange County earlier last week, I might be justified in regarding Dharma as something of a lightweight. On the other hand, the Pacific Chorale and Pacific Symphony were so poorly led by John Alexander, miles out of his depth, that I’m not sure I heard the work at all. Both works, obviously, need further hearing. Both proclaim Adams as one of our worthiest modern masters. Meanwhile, back at Disney, further exultation on the matter of Friday’s program devolves upon the phenomenal Yo-Yo Ma, set loose on Witold Lutoslawski’s gloriously quizzical Cello Concerto. Lutoslawski, another worthy master, visited us often in his time and is much missed; this concerto from 1970, with its fascinating back-and-forth argle-bargle between soloist and orchestra and its trick ending that leaves you dangling, belongs among his masterpieces.

I’ve left myself no space to gurgle about the Disney surroundings: the gardens, the great blue cabbage rose of a fountain, the sense of belonging that it shares with the city around it. Among last week’s masterpieces, the sunset on Thursday night also deserves honored mention. Our new hall has already earned its blessing from On High.

Photo by Jay Blakesberg

In Santa Monica there was In C, Terry Riley’s first great work, now approaching 40. In Costa Mesa there was Sun Rings, Riley’s latest great work, in its first local hearing. The music of the years between these two strange and wondrous masterpieces forms a body of creativity like nothing else on Earth: irritating at times and self-indulgent beyond redemption but often lit with a visionary’s authentic ecstasy. Were our pathways not already illuminated by the presence of this smiling, soft-spoken, supernally wise gnome, he would be impossible to invent.

In C has always been a piece apart, an ingenious trick to test a hearer’s perception, a whimsical spinning of substance out of nothingness. That’s all very well, but the performance earlier this month at Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church – the first event in a nicely concocted new chamber-music series called “Jacaranda” – struck me as being about more than mere tricks. It seemed to me as if the work has now settled into the repertory as a milestone in the onrush of music over the past several decades. The 45-minute performance in Santa Monica – nine players, led by Mark Hilt on the church’s excellent small organ – was spirited and forward-moving, but it was the work itself that provided the evening’s luster: the right music in the right place at the right time. The next Jacaranda concert, all-Schubert, is scheduled for November 8.

It won’t take 40 years for Sun Rings – given in Segerstrom Hall as the high point of this year’s Eclectic Orange festival – to prove itself a masterpiece; it already is. The work’s fame has preceded it here, most of all in Mark Swed’s admiring report in the Times last November. Its foundation is in the researches of Dr. Don Gurnett of the University of Iowa, who has devised a way of recording the tweets and bongs produced around certain planetary bodies by the movements of gases, as caught by Gurnett’s plasma-wave recorders mounted on Voyager spacecraft. Two propositions emerged as consequences to this repertory of celestial noises captured in Dr. Gurnett’s gadgetry: that Terry Riley was the inevitable earthling to transmute these sounds into a musical design and that the Kronos Quartet was the inevitable agency to transmute that design into performance art.

The result is, indeed, art of high quality. The space sounds dance around the stage, mirrored in classy projections of planetary stuff and laboratory formulas. The Kronos sits in a galaxy of its own, downstage, surrounded by small lights on metal rods, and by a few other rods that function like the receptors on a theremin. The tech sounds are amplified at times, and, of course, processed so that tweet occasionally turns into boom and vice versa. Best of all, they are sparingly used; not for Terry Riley the exuberant balderdash of Alan Hovhaness and the mating moans of humpback whales. Riley’s own music, from the Kronos live and from more kinds of synthesizer than I could ever list, is many kinds of gorgeous – the enchanted tripping of his folk-dance stuff (as in his Harp of New Albion) and a melodic manner rich, lyrical and breath-stopping that I haven’t heard before. In two of the 10 movements a chorus enters, softly and tenderly. You fear for a moment or two the intrusion of Gustav Holst and his gooey Planets stuff, and just between us, those movements might be spared.

So much, however, is good. I’ve been writing about Sun Rings in the present tense, because it stands to reason that the work is meant for further touring and, eventually, for DVD. The crowd at Segerstrom was fair-sized, expanded by several school groups, mostly middle school. I’d give anything to have heard the reports in classrooms the next morning.

Three Tales, with music by Steve Reich and video by his wife, Beryl Korot, is all the proof you need of the value of DVD as one of the most enlightened phenomena of this age. The “tales” themselves are actually three glosses on era-defining events: the explosion of the Zeppelin Hindenburg in New Jersey in 1937, the atomic tests at Bikini Island just after WWII and the cloning of the sheep Dolly in 1997. Originally there was a plan to blend the Hindenburg into footage of the real General Hindenburg, who had led Germany into the hands of Adolf Hitler in 1933; that episode was dropped, but is included in the outtakes on the video. Count on this new DVD technology to preserve what was, and what might have been, in equally brimming measure. (Three Tales had been scheduled for performance at Royce Hall this season, but was canceled when it was found that the hall was inadequately wired for its demands.)

Strange as the mix of “tales” may sound, the work comes across as the bearer of disturbing, extraordinarily powerful information. What makes it so, above all, is the interaction of sight and sound, the way Korot’s repetitive pounding of video images exactly mirrors the obsessive voices in Reich’s music. You cannot easily come away from that moment in the Hindenburg section, for example, when the manic reruns of the sight of the explosion are intercut with the sound of CBS’s on-the-scene announcer Herb Morrison’s hysterical repeats of the word flame. Nor from the agonizing scenes where Uncle Sam’s diplomatic envoy explains to a gathering of Bikini residents, several times repeated, why they must give up their island to the American atomic testers for the salvation of mankind. Nor from the gathering of scientists (including, no less, Stephen Jay Gould and “virtual reality” inventor Jaron Lanier) dealing with where the world might go past the barrier of animal and human cloning.

Where the world might go – past the marvelous joining of words and music, audible and visual composition – is the further prospect raised by this remarkably brainy creation of the Reichs, and the capturing of it onto a tiny piece of shiny plastic. Brave new world, indeed!

The office of composer laureate does not yet exist here; if it did, John Adams would be the hands-down choice for occupant. In the quarter-century since his works reached their first thunderstruck, cheering audiences, he has found within his soul the appropriate music for a swath of American history that includes Richard Nixon’s visit to China, San Francisco’s Loma Prieta earthquake, the hijacking of a cruise ship by Islamic terrorists, the impact of 9/11 on the streets of New York, and the poetic mystique of California itself. On the Transmigration of Souls, the work for voices and orchestra reflecting the 9/11 tragedy, commissioned and first performed by the New York Philharmonic, went on to win this year’s Pulitzer Prize; it gets its first local hearing on October 19 at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Hall, by the Pacific Symphony and Chorale under John Alexander. That poetic obsession with the Californian essence forms the substance of The Dharma at Big Sur, first to be heard here on October 24 in one of the three “gala” events celebrating the opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall.

“I had no intention of writing a piece about 9/11,” says Adams on the phone from his Berkeley home, in a one-day break between preparing the California performances and leading the inaugural performances at Carnegie Hall’s new Zankel Hall, where he seems to have left no room for his own music on the all-American concert he will conduct. “But then the New York Philharmonic called with the offer of a commission, and that was like a command performance. For my generation – and for generations before – growing up with music meant growing up with the Philharmonic: the concert broadcasts on Sunday afternoons, and the educational programs with Leonard Bernstein; this was a totemic orchestra. After 9/11 some people gave blood, some people wrote books; everybody was moved to do whatever possible, and writing music was, for me, the obvious possibility.”

Both new works, as it happens, are substantial examples of what Adams refers to as his “public” pieces. “You’ve known me for now, what, 25 years; you know that basically I’m a very private person, the outgrowth of my Yankee upbringing. Lately I’ve had to reconcile that attitude with the demand for public works; without blowing my own horn, I like to link myself with Frank Gehry. Large pieces – operas, orchestra works, concert halls – need to preserve the personality of the maker while pleasing the outside world, and it’s not always easy.”

Maybe not, but you have to admire Adams for trying, and succeeding in so many ways. Transmigration feeds on the horror of the 9/11 attack, not as a Straussian tone poem, but from the inside. Its words – for chorus, children’s chorus and tapes of people directly affected by the violence – form an emotional core. Voices call out the names of the missing; the sirens mingle with other city noises, and with the large orchestra that seems to vibrate as a horrified eyewitness. “We love you, Chick,” intones a boy’s voice out of the murk. “I loved him from the start,” echoes the children’s chorus, in the words of a bereaved lover. At the end, the chorus calls out a litany of names of the missing: “Juan Garcia . . . Michael Taldonio . . . my mother,” and the music dissolves into a pianissimo “I love you” and mingles with the dust of that awful day.

Dharma is, of course, happier stuff; take it as the latest step in the growing love affair between Adams and California, an affair that began in 1971, when his parents – both musicians of sorts – presented him with a copy of John Cage’s Silence upon his graduation from Harvard. “That owner’s manual of the alternate arts became for me a summons to abandon the Ivy League and move west,” he says. “Thirty years later, I can still remember that primordial moment, my first viewing of the Pacific Ocean. My own memory resounds with the writings of the others, from Fra Junipero Serra to John Muir to Robinson Jeffers to Jack Kerouac. It resounds in the music of Lou Harrison, who looked out across the Pacific and found other echoes on the far shore.” (Harrison’s Concerto in Slendro, his radiantly beautiful music inspired by Indonesian scales and rhythms, figured in Adams’ inaugural concert at New York’s Zankel Hall. It’s high time the East Coast learned more about the much-neglected Harrison and his westward glance.)

“I planned Dharma as a piece about ambiance,” says Adams, “and then in addition it became a violin concerto. That happened when I discovered the phenomenal Tracy Silverman, who will play the solo part on his six-string electric violin. One important aspect of the ‘Californian’ quality is my use of unusual tuning systems, especially that much-misunderstood system known as ‘just intonation.’ Lou Harrison was a strong proponent of unusual tunings, because they brought us closer to a universal harmony. Dharma uses a big orchestra, plus all kinds of electronic devices, plus Tracy; it runs nearly half an hour.”

Within the time frame of the two Adams premieres in Southern California, his kinky orchestra piece called Lollapalooza will delight audiences at two hearings in Barcelona, audiences at the Prague National Theater will hear two performances of his opera The Death of Klinghoffer, and Leila Josefowicz will unleash her phenomenal energies on the Violin Concerto with the Toledo (Ohio, this time) Symphony. Most remarkable among these events is the resurgence of Klinghoffer after its troubled American premiere in 1991 and a history of summary rejections in the intervening years. The Los Angeles Opera, one of the work’s co-commissioners, reneged on its announced performance, and the Boston Symphony canceled a scheduled performance of excerpts that would have taken place a few weeks after 9/11. The problem has never been Adams’ score, which remains one of his most emotionally loaded works, but rather the Alice Goodman text, in which members of an Islamic terrorist cell, now in command of the hijacked cruise ship Achille Lauro, sing of their hatreds toward the outside world. “America is one big Jew” did not go over well in 1991; it has taken a decade and more to let these words settle back into perspective and the music be recognized for its eloquence.

The tide turned. I was at the concert performance at London’s Barbican, to start a dazzling all-Adams weekend, in January 2002; it was a hot-ticket item that drew an ecstatic, mostly young crowd. At that time elsewhere in London, Adams himself was preparing a film version of the score; that has now been shown in Britain and the U.S., and is due for DVD release before the year’s end; this month’s Prague production is one further step along its road to redemption. “The subject matter is painful,” Adams freely admits. “But the best thing is that people have gone back to it.”

I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: A true laureate can even set a California earthquake to music, and this frisky bit of stage biz shook up a few viewers at its 1995 Berkeley premiere. “A few people felt that this was a comedown,” Adams remembers. “They just don’t know about my lighter side. They forget that my very first performance was next to my mother in a production of South Pacific in Concord, New Hampshire. That was me on that stage, with two other stage brats, singing ‘Dites-moi, pourquoi, la vie est belle.’

“When I first came to San Francisco,” he continues, “I did some teaching at the Conservatory, but I prefer a less formal framework. Our house in Berkeley is always full of kids – my own and other people’s. We work on projects, mostly in musical theater on the level of Ceiling/Sky, and it becomes a real workshop. The first boy you’ll hear on tape in Transmigration, singing ‘missing . . . missing,’ is one of my kids. My musical life began working with kids, and a lot of it continues that way.”

Two recent items from the University of California Press, too small for the wisdom they contain, provide some interesting insights on American music making and creative attitudes over the last several decades. One is Paul Bowles on Music, a collection of writings by the late man-of-many-arts during the years (1935–46) of his gainful employment as music critic on the New York scene. The other is the Reflections of an American Composer by Arthur Berger, at 91 still very much with us and with it. This also has a few scraps from his time as music critic, but not nearly enough; the greater substance deals with Berger’s memories of the pitched battle among music’s ardent practitioners, a listening public whose collective ears always seem to lie immediately out of reach, and the stern judges whose powers of determination may impede the back-and-forth flow of acceptance and rejection. As with Bowles, Berger’s field of vision begins somewhere in the 1930s, but continues right up to a few hours ago.

Both men were members of a confraternity that has pretty much gone out of existence: practicing, serious composers, employed by one newspaper, the New York Herald Tribune, where their chores often entailed writing about the music of their colleagues and competitors. The man who ran the Trib‘s music department, Virgil Thomson, saw nothing wrong with this interesting conflict; it was balanced by the exceptional acuity and experience of its members. (Lou Harrison, John Cage and Theodore Chanler were other sporadic members of this ambidextrous assemblage.) Between the lines of both these books is a panorama of an active musical life – in New York most of all, but also on other East Coast outposts – with composers mostly young, chased back from their European strongholds by the growing Nazi specter, and striving with all their might to establish an American musical identity. (Interesting comparison: Coincident with this rising tide of Americanism on the New York scene was the sudden emergence of Los Angeles as a kind of Europe-in-exile, with Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Toch and Castelnuovo-Tedesco, exploding into awareness through the “Evenings on the Roof” concerts and similar activities.)

Berger’s Reflections becomes a series of battlefield reports; he delights in dualities. In music criticism there was Thomson, whose entry onto the Trib consisted of taking a bloody bite out of the rival Times‘ sacred cows, the symphonies of Jan Sibelius. Paul Rosenfeld, the unpredictable gadfly in all the arts, faces off in a Berger essay against B.H. Haggin of the legendary narrow, woefully predictable tastes; the two most ardent proponents of new-music adventure, conductors Serge Koussevitzky and Dimitri Mitropoulos, cross swords even as they seem to join the battle on the same side.

There is a brief teaser of Berger’s critical prowess; I hope there’ll be more. From a few brief scraps we learn nothing we couldn’t learn again today: that the Shostakovich Sixth consists mostly of emptiness; that there is genuine power in the music of Leon Kirchner, promise in the then-young Ned Rorem’s music, and less in the music of George Rochberg. In the Bowles collection (edited, with obvious enthusiasm if a few proofreading slips, by the O.C. Register‘s Tim Mangan), the Shostakovich Sixth fares even less well – “the esthetic of the billboard rather than of the canvas.” That guy could write.

The Bowles collection begins with freelance pieces for Modern Music, that noble light in the darkness that flickered out in 1946. You have to be struck immediately by the range of his interests: black jazz in its raw vitality, a prescient note on Silvestre Revueltas, and, most interesting of all, a gathering of insightful film-music essays whose profundity no writer of my acquaintance seems to match these days. Film music, to Bowles, was an art to be taken seriously, spread-eagled across the same standards that might apply to opera or cantata before a live audience; did it occur to any other critic of Bowles’ or our time to deal so seriously with the “gilt and plush horror” of Disney’s Pinocchio, or to note that “Franz Waxman’s score for Rebecca is not even as good as Hitchcock’s direction”?

Bowles’ Trib stuff is outstandingly bright and knowing. Maybe something can be said against composers as critics, but surely nothing can be wrong with an honest-to-God writer invading the sacred precincts of our art. His musical writing chronicles the discoveries and determinations of a graceful and wise mind. To my troubled outlook, struggling with the agonies a week after spinal surgery when every turn of phrase is extruded from the word processor with the twist of a blunt-edge scalpel, the discovery of this kind of writing is like therapy at its coolest, most soothing.

Of Walter Piston, Arthur Berger wrote that “he was someone who seemed to be completely self-possessed . . . he always spoke good sense.” Piston was the American educational eminence of his day, comparable in stature to Nadia Boulanger in Paris; everybody had to walk through his shadow at one time or another. Today his music is in the shadows, even though his large-scale works – the eight symphonies above all – also speak good sense. It’s hard to remember back to my days at Harvard, when this terse, organized music was the newest, and the most fearsome, stuff in the local concert halls.

The Second Symphony stirs special memories. At Harvard I was an about-to-become-lapsed premed, my love of the place sustained only by music classes with the exhilarating G. Wallace Woodworth. Woody got the nod to guest-conduct the Boston Symphony in the 1943 premiere of the Piston Second, and we in the class got to go to his dress rehearsal. It was the first piece of music by a living, visible composer I ever knew. It was then what it is now, a clear, neatly cohesive work that you could take into a classical-sonata-form class and locate all the points – tidy and expressive, with a drop-dead-beautiful slow movement. Naxos, that splendidly adventurous company, has just reissued the Gerard Schwarz recording (formerly, costlier, on Delos). It neatly fills out the aura around these fine new books.

Everything that is splendid about the Los Angeles Opera’s Damnation of Faust – about which I rhapsodized at our last get-together – is imponderably awful in Deborah Drattell’s Nicholas and Alexandra, the season’s second offering and the company’s first full-scale commission, given here its world premiere. For three excruciating hours, the sad fate of Russia’s dysfunctional Romanovs and their demons oozes across the Pavilion stage; at the end, Deborah Drattell’s woefully inept score has revealed nothing more about the characters – 39 separate singing roles! – than we gleaned from the printed program. Preparing for this event, I ran the 1971 Franklin Schaffner film of the Robert K. Massie book of the same title, and came away convinced that nobody could produce a drearier hunk of music than its Richard Rodney Bennett score. Boy, was I mistaken!

For the Brooklyn-born Drattell, 47 and the happy mother of four, a history of less-than-rapturous reviews of her previous work – the opera Lilith, which the New York City Opera produced in November 2001, and one of the three one-acters that made up the City Opera’s Central Park trilogy a couple of years before – doesn’t seem to have dampened her creative ardor. She talks a good interview, all about her long-held dreams of writing this opera, and especially of writing it for Plácido Domingo. Her librettist is Nicholas von Hoffman, whose previous credentials include a biography of Roy Cohn and who, she wants us to know, comes from a Russian background. (So do I, if anyone cares.)

Dreams and bloodlines do not always spell out great operas, and the inadequacies of Nicholas and Alexandra are numerous and painful. Nothing in Drattell’s dense, tuneless, pseudo-high-Russian-romantic smog of a score serves to identify her characters: Russia’s bumbling, kindhearted, ineffective last ruler; his loving but put-upon empress; the conniving self-proclaimed monk who holds the royal family in his thrall; the plotters and subplotters who bring about their nation’s downfall. Who are these people? Do they love one another, or pity, or loathe? We expect music in an opera to answer these questions – at least from a composer whose instincts are basically the urge to please a crowd with music that the old folks at home might groove to. When two leading characters join voices in one of their rare happy moments, we expect something like a love duet – not La Traviata, perhaps, but at least music that suggests that these people are listening to each other. But no.

Rodney Gilfry is the Nicholas, Nancy Gustafson the Alexandra; both are commendable singers capable of shaping attractive, memorable melodic lines; Drattell’s score offers them none. As the hemophilia-racked Tsarevich Alexis, the opera’s one sympathetic character, young Jonathan Price gets to wail “Mama!” a few times, little more. Plácido Domingo is the Rasputin; Drattell, no fool she, has handed him the longest role, the loudest and the juiciest – enough to throw the dramatic structure seriously off balance. (Why, in fact, didn’t she just call the thing Rasputin, or Plácido?)

It could be, of course, that all the PR gobbledygook around Domingo’s taking on his first-ever villainous role bears a semblance of truth; maybe he heard something in the music beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals. Even so, his Rasputin is a mistake, a masterpiece of miscasting, a misplanned stunt, a failure within a failure. The rich plangency of Domingo’s Siegmund shines through and defeats that overtone of evil that Drattell has written into the part. On opening night, despite an announced tracheal inflammation, Domingo sang out loud and clear, a hero but not a demon. Tradition regards Rasputin as a basso, preferably profundo. There might be a tenor sound that could work for that character – the weasely sound of, say, a Shuisky in Boris Godunov. That such a sound is beyond Domingo’s reach can be taken as a compliment.

Anne Bogart, a practiced Drattell hand, directs; with her comes SITI, a company of 10 dancer/athletes whose job is to mix in on the already crowded stage and push around the sliding panels of Robert Israel’s monochrome stage designs. (Interesting coincidence: The Achim Freyer Ensemble, also comprising 10 dancer/athletes, served a similar purpose in the Faust.) On the podium is Russian supercellist/conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, whose qualifications include ownership of a cache of Rasputin documents acquired at a Russian auction. That, however, doesn’t get him through the turgidities of the score, and its obsession with small rhythmic figures that eventually turn into nagging. Upstage, behind a scrim, the chorus groan out some Slavic harmonies; toward the end, one of their melodic lines gestures passionately in the direction of a Bach chorale but doesn’t quite make it.

Nothing, in fact, does.

This is the time of year when our local seasonlessness makes for interesting segues: one night at the Hollywood Bowl, then an opera, then more Bowl. On the final Philharmonic Tuesday came one of the summer’s best programs: Michele Zukovsky’s sublime performance of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and the Mahler First. Yasuo Shinozaki conducted the bejesus out of the Mahler: a huge performance, raucous and unruly in the very best ways, with the eight horns at the end standing up and commanding the heavens to open.

On Thursday, Esa-Pekka Salonen did his usual number on the Beethoven Ninth: neat and crisp, the Scherzo repeats properly respected, the slow movement a bit on the juiceless side. Preceding the Ninth, and rendering that work pale by comparison, came a curious revenant from bygone musical enthusiasms, Ariel Ramírez’s Misa Criolla. An alluring pastiche, it blends the text of the Latin Mass – parts of it, anyhow – into a background of maracas, guitars and anything noisy available. There were lots of these pieces around at one time; I remember clerking at the Art Music Co. in Berkeley, with the listening booths fairly vibrating to their beat. Perhaps the Vatican’s 1963 legitimizing of vernacular liturgy had something to do with it. Hearing it live at the Bowl, in a performance by Huayucaltia and Opus 7, was like opening an old and forgotten closet. There isn’t much music in the work; the tunes are right out of an old provincial hymnbook. But then the percussion takes over, you can’t resist, and you don’t really want to.

Photo by robert millard

Everything you could hope to encounter in an evening of truly enlightened musical drama – superb music splendidly comprehended, a dramatic concept original yet honorable, a stage design to stimulate the eye – is there for your delectation in the Los Angeles Opera’s La Damnation de Faust, which began the company’s 18th season last week and lingers through September 28. Any persistent doubts concerning this offering’s value – based, perhaps, on the awareness that Faust, an exemplar of Hector Berlioz’s creative imagination at its most refulgent, was first planned as a concert piece and not an opera at all – should be dispelled forthwith. Whatever its category, this is marvelous musical theater, by Berlioz and by the enlightened spirits who have brought his work to life on our local stage.

From the theatrical imagination of Achim Freyer, who conceived, designed and directed, I expected no less. Although I found evidence of misadventure in his last work here – a visual production, arguably redundant, of Bach’s B-minor Mass – there is a level of intelligence in his stage work that sets him apart from, and above, most of his European colleagues. (The one available DVD of his work is his version of Philip Glass’ Satyagraha, and it’s a knockout.) You have only to compare the inventive level in this new Faust, its high-flying fantasy still maintaining an honest awareness of the incendiary collaboration of Goethe and Berlioz, with the willful Eurotrash of Thomas Langhoff’s production of the same work visited upon a hapless San Francisco Opera audience last June. On that sorry evening, the Sylphides sported whips and thongs, Méphistophélès a baseball cap; some of the most beautiful music – the Will-o’-the-Wisps’ minuet, for example – was omitted entirely.

Achim Freyer’s Wisps dance deliciously on a blacked-out stage, their costumes edged in Christmas-tree lights; his Sylphides are puffs of airborne whiteness that exactly echo the flecks of woodwind tone in Berlioz’s magical orchestration. Freyer’s demons chant their demonic nonsense syllables through gigantic trumpets overhead; his angelic choir is a delightful kiddie chorus, their heads barely protruding up from hellish depths. His Méphisto wears a large number “6,” the familiar icon of diablerie. Some among us seemed puzzled by the presence onstage of a cavorting black poodle. Read your Goethe, folks; this is the very “Pudel” (but, of course, French this time) that follows Faust to his home and there morphs into his satanic companion.

The cross-references are wondrously rich. If the stage biz echoes the sound of the Berlioz orchestra, the looks of the production also evoke the aura of Dr. Faust’s own universe: a Brueghel world (or Bosch, perhaps?) of grotesque, larger-than-life masks and raucous folk dancing; of oversize toy soldiers acting out their Hungarian marches, and boozy students pouring out of some medieval Animal House. In a program note, Freyer takes some pains to link the geometry of his stage pictures to the spirit of the play: the vertical lines that connect heaven and earth, the horizontals to suggest movement and time. More to the point, it seems to me, are the connections Freyer’s stage pictures suggest to the expanse of Berlioz’s own musical genius, and the interaction of that ardent spirit with the dark flames of Goethe’s all-knowing text. We live in an age when wiseass operatic producers delight in transplanting familiar repertory pieces into uncharted territory – ah, there, Peter Sellars, with your Figaro in the Trump Tower! This Faust of Achim Freyer – the final creation of his lifetime, according to his statement made here last week – is something quite different: an intensely thought-out examination and expansion of the work’s fiery genius as rekindled from within.

Kent Nagano’s orchestra frames these wonders with colors richly applied. (It may be true that a Berlioz sound spectrum loses some of its flicker when performed in an orchestra pit rather than on a stage; this is a redesign matter that the Los Angeles Opera could profitably address in its new role as sole possessor of the premises.) The pacing is sure, and the complexities in the ensemble writing – even in the famous fugue, which Berlioz himself described as “la bestialité dans toute sa candeur” – are kept in nice balance. Some of Berlioz’s stratospheric writing constitutes cruelty to innocent tenors, but Paul Groves manages most of the challenges with commendable – if not supreme – marksmanship. The Méphistophélès is, of course, Samuel Ramey; his certificate of ownership of that role (in its many operatic manifestations) is beginning to fray, but the style is still there. On opening night, however, Denyce Graves hit rather a depressing number of misdirected notes for a singer this early in her career. Perhaps the need to cope with hair braids the width of the Pavilion stage disconcerted her somewhat. I know they would me.

Minor objections aside, this wonderfully brainy production needs to stand as a landmark, a glowing assertion of the power and the glory of contemporary operatic thinking. The visual magic in Freyer’s conception is immediately attractive; this is a night of operatic enchantment that can beguile on any level. But there is more here: an investment of creative energy in a work not at all familiar, itself drenched in arrogance and bravado. In his two productions here, both this marvelous Faust and the Bach of two seasons ago (which was at least an interesting failure), Freyer and his cohorts have offered Los Angeles a demonstration of opera-making strong, distinctive and true.

Landmarks do, however, crumble at times; I write these paeans the morning after the dress rehearsal of the L.A. Opera’s “other” season’s opener, Deborah Drattell’s Nicholas and Alexandra. That experience sent me to my thesaurus to locate new synonyms for “inept.” Stay tuned.

Christopher O’Riley toiled honorably at the Hollywood Bowl last week, and so did the Philharmonic under its excellent assistant conductor Yasuo Shinozaki, but the music slumbered on. Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto has, I’m afraid, reached the end of its useful days. Like its spavined companions in the ranks of warhorses ready for the glue factory – names on request, starting perhaps with the César Franck symphony and lurching downward from there – its bones have been picked dry. I still give it a little shelf space, in distinguished past readings by the likes of Dinu Lipatti and Walter Gieseking, but I’m convinced that Mr. Grieg and I will remain on friendlier terms if we now acknowledge each other’s existence in silence.

O’Riley is a skillful, caring pianist. I think that what he was trying the other night, with his tempos on the slow side and his relatively limited dynamics, was to reinvent the piece, to wrap it in soft, romantic accents as if to reiterate its obvious kinship with the one past masterpiece it most closely resembles. That didn’t work; all his approach seemed to accomplish was to point out the great debt owed by Grieg’s inferior piece to the infinitely superior concerto of Robert Schumann composed 23 years earlier. Strange, isn’t it, how close these two concertos are, how much design and actual melodic substance the later work actually cribs from the earlier work – and how, in terms of survival strength, the glorious Schumann concerto towers over the pallid rip-off by the lesser spirit from the North.

It was, in fact, a week of warhorses at the Bowl, with the Grieg at the low point, and a couple of Slavic symphonies whose staying power remains intact. The Philharmonic’s two backup men were in charge, the splendid Shinozaki and the ebullient Miguel Harth-Bedoya. Both young conductors are well on their way toward important careers: Shinozaki as a much-admired guest with several orchestras in Finland, Harth-Bedoya as head of the Fort Worth Symphony. Our own orchestra would do well to hold on to as much of their services as it can.

Borodin’s Second Symphony concluded Shinozaki’s program in a bright, vivid performance; like most of the works by this insecure and alcohol-ravaged member of the Russian “Five” (and by his compatriot Mussorgsky), the music needed several other hands to bring it to completion. But the resultant hybrid is strong stuff: the brutal menace of the first movement, the airy edginess of the scherzo (written in the curious time signature of 1/1) and, above all, the ecstasies of the haunting slow movement. Maybe it hasn’t yet attained “warhorse” status, in fact; I kept discovering previously unnoticed musical turns in Shinozaki’s performance. Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony, which began Harth-Bedoya’s program, may be better music by some hypothetical measurement; in a sensible, dry-eyed performance such as Harth-Bedoya delivered, its emotional impact can still be overpowering. An excess of fame garnered over its 110-year lifetime has relegated it to the “Oh no, not that again!” category, and its beautiful orchestral points – the interplay of winds and strings that makes Dvorák’s orchestral works better company than their close relatives from the pen of Brahms – didn’t all come across through the Bowl’s amplification. Still, Harth-Bedoya’s reading got me to sit up straight and pay proper attention.

Prokofiev’s lightweight score for the (apparently, alas, lost) film Lieutenant Kije came and went congenially midway in Shinozaki’s program, its orchestral fine points victimized by poor mike placement. Samuel Barber’s enchanting Knoxville: Summer of 1915, which should have cast a further glow on the Harth-Bedoya program, was rendered virtually textless by Elissa Johnston’s poor diction. A dear, departed old friend did, however, turn up in the Barber work, in the program notes by Nicolas Slonimsky, which dealt wisely and wittily with what the music was about and how it was meant to sound. They don’t write ’em like that anymore – not often enough, at any rate.

A new ECM release on the shelves next Tuesday offers two works by USC’s Stephen Hartke that create a fascinating linkup between the spirits of adventure bygone and up-to-date. Tituli, the first and longer of the works (42 minutes), draws upon fragments of inscriptions carved or scratched onto ancient Roman artifacts, and expands seven of these brief phrases into complex musical structures for small vocal ensemble, a solo violin and percussion. The music itself is a haunting mix of the mannerisms of ancient chant – harmonies in the parallel movement known as organum mingled with a rhapsodic melodic line for the violinist and a background of solemn thudding from small drums and the lower register of a marimba. If you share my passion for a previous ECM release called Mnemosyne, in which Jan Garbarek’s ecstatic saxophones twined around voices intoning chantlike music old and new, you should recognize a kindred spirit in this new work of Hartke’s – which, by the way, was one of the three finalists for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize.

Once again, as in Mnemosyne, the singers are the members of the Hilliard Ensemble (with a couple of personnel changes and their number upped from four to five). Michelle Makarski is the violinist; Lynn Vartan and Javier Diaz are the percussionists. The performance originated at USC in January 2001, conducted by Donald Crockett. The companion work is Hartke’s 18-minute Cathedral in the Thrashing Rain for voices alone, a setting of words and moods by the Japanese poet and sculptor Kotaro Takamura. Here the inspiration is a visual image, the ecstasy of the writer’s first view of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Again, the harmonies draw upon influences old and new: passages of organum that translate the look of Notre Dame’s grandiose interior into deep, dark sound, and an exhilarating sound-picture of the rainstorm itself.

Next week the New York Philharmonic performs Hartke’s Third Symphony, a commissioned work that again employs the Hilliard Ensemble, with an Anglo-Saxon text prophetic of the 9/11 catastrophe. In 2006 the enterprising Glimmerglass Opera in upstate New York will stage his new commissioned opera, based on the Maupassant short story Boule de Suif. A satirical cantata, Sons of Noah, in which the sons fight over dividing up the property even before the ark has landed, was released on the New World label earlier this year; a clarinet concerto written for Richard Stoltzman is listed for release on Naxos this month. Hartke, at the moment, rides high.

Okay, so the science guys have backed down, and Mozart’s music no longer bears the seal of approval as a remedy for dumbness. Believe this if you will – you and the Times‘ Mark Swed, who broke the sad tidings in his review of last week’s all-Mozart program at the Hollywood Bowl. I sat through this excellent program (on its Thursday-night repeat) rapturously rediscovering the intelligence that shaped every note in these three sublime works from over 13 years in their composer’s foreshortened existence. There was much cause for this rapture: the unforced eloquence in concertmaster Martin Chalifour’s delivery of the earliest of these works, the G-major Violin Concerto of 1775, and the way guest conductor Bernard Labadie managed and balanced the intricacies in one of the earlier symphonies (No. 34, from 1780) and, above all, in the miraculous “Jupiter” Symphony (No. 41, from 1788). Maybe it’s true that Mozart’s music won’t raise the IQ of those fortunate enough to fall under its spell, but it’s the best cure I know for self-importance. I couldn’t write any of this music, and neither could you.

It’s easy to fall into the mental set that relegates Mozart’s teenage output – the violin concertos, the early chamber music, the operas built around the conventions of rococo artifice – onto a lesser level of quality. Take this G-major concerto, however, and measure it against the voluminous output of the prolific craftsmen of the time – Boccherini for one, and even the formidable Salieri; the human voice through all three movements of this marvelous, original, perfectly formed music sings in a different language, and tells us a lot more than merely the shape of the C-major scale. Mozart builds his first movement around an ongoing dialogue between the solo violin and the orchestra’s first oboe – with no words, but so much on their minds! He starts off his slow movement with a tune that in its first bars seems to hang suspended, unsupported; only later the orchestra comes in under with its supporting harmonies. (This is a Mozart trick often used; both symphonies in last week’s program also begin their slow movements in the same way.) He interrupts the progress of his last movement with a whole ‘nother episode that breezes in and then out again; we react to it as in a double take. How many violin concertos had you composed at 19?

Labadie, like Chalifour, is of French-Canadian origin. He was last here in April 2001, in a program of early Haydn symphonies with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. He is written about as an early-music specialist, but visions of straitjacketed tempos and rigidity of phrasing that adhere to others under that epithet seem not to apply in his case. He apparently has his own ideas about when to observe Mozart’s specified repeats (the “Jupiter” Symphony) and when not to (the 34th); his phrasing – as in the opening of the “Jupiter” – tended toward the loose, the loving and the communicative. All evening, I had the distinct impression that Mozart and I were in direct communication and I was learning a lot.

Across Cahuenga Pass earlier last week there was chamber music at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater, three substantial works performed by the young and proficient Calder Quartet. I love the Ford, and always have, even though chamber music has been only a small part of this summer’s offerings. The current setup, however, has not been designed to please admirers of intimate and subtle music making. Instead of the clear-plastic backdrop, which in previous years had reflected the music out into the audience without blocking the view of the forest behind, the performances the other night were amplified, excruciatingly so, and the lovely closeness of the place (which seats a mere 1,200, after all, as opposed to the Bowl’s 18,000) was destroyed. Before the program there was a rambling, doddering welcoming speech by old-time local concert promoter Gene Golden, which elicited exasperated glances from people around me. The printed program was a mélange of misinformation. Haydn’s “Rider” Quartet is in G minor, not D.

All this aside, along with a snapped string on Eric Byers’ cello – a legitimate setback – the Calder performed splendidly. The group was founded at USC in 1998 and has traveled widely, including two summers at the Aspen Festival and several dates in Europe. This coming season, the quartet will be in residence at the Colburn School. Benjamin Jacobson, Andrew Bulbrook and Jonathan Moerschel are the other members, all still in their 20s. The Haydn – an amazing work, with a slow movement that knocks on Romanticism’s door – was capitally played; Beethoven’s Third “Razumovsky” Quartet, with its dizzying perpetuum mobile finale, went almost as well. At the end they were joined by four more USC string players in the Mendelssohn Octet – endearing, youthful but unchallenging music that is actually beginning to wear rather thin.

Los Angeles needs a resident quartet; on the strength of this one hearing, the Calders are worthy of consideration. When I came here in 1980 the Sequoia Quartet was making the best noise in town. More recently we had the Angeles, which broke apart when first violinist Kathleen Lenski moved north; its compact-disc set of the complete Haydn is testimonial to its value. In Zipper Hall the city finally has a small-sounds venue that’s acoustically admirable and comfortable; the problem will be to fill it with sounds worthy of its sight. Yesterday’s mail brought news of a new project, Chamber Music Los Angeles, which is to reach young audiences with concerts, master classes, open rehearsals and hospital visits; the kickoff concert is at Zipper on September 28, with the Angeles resurrected this one time and a program that includes, need I add, the Mendelssohn Octet. Somebody around town should be marshaling similar benevolent music making for us grown-ups.

If you’re as old as I am, you can remember a time when Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons was one of music’s unknown quantities. My Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia from 1948 – the year the long-playing disc hit the market – doesn’t list a single authentic recording. By 1952 there were two – an honorable version with the violinist Louis Kaufman as soloist and a dishonorable one juiced up in high romantic fashion by Bernardino Molinari. My latest Schwann lists 80, including one on a disc titled Build Your Baby’s Brain and another whose soloists include “The Winter Trombone.” These days you can fill a hall by scheduling The Four Seasons; last week’s two performances at the Hollywood Bowl drew what looked to me like the biggest crowds of any “classical” night this season. Perhaps the additional presence on the program of Mark O’Connor’s The American Seasons helped draw the crowds, but I’d like to credit Los Angeles audiences with better taste than that.

JoAnn Falletta conducted, remembered more or less fondly from her days as head of the Long Beach Symphony, currently leading the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Virginia Symphony Orchestra; last New Year’s Day she led the same Vivaldi/O’Connor double bill on PBS. She gets around, but she didn’t get very far around Vivaldi’s picturesque fantasies on this occasion. The four violin soloists, all Los Angeles Philharmonic members – Michele Bovyer, Akiko Tarumoto, Stacy Wetzel and Jonathan Wei – had played the work at the Music Center under Miguel Harth-Bedoya last November, and had been encouraged by the conductor to approach the performance with four different takes on proper baroque style. I remember with particular pleasure how Wei turned the final section into a lively winter carnival. Apparently Falletta had no such intent; everything about her performance was clean, correct and little more. You could march to it, perhaps, but never dance.

Credit Mark O’Connor with the business sense to compose a complementary work to the Vivaldi: the same half-a-program length and – except for guitar replacing harpsichord – the same scoring. Of musical sense in his work I detected somewhat less. O’Connor has made a name in a kind of thinking person’s crossover; Yo-Yo Ma and Richard Stoltzman are among his companions, and they draw upon sources rooted in world lore: a worldwide indigenous language that extends from the Silk Road to Route 66. O’Connor composes a synthesized Americana; it sounds like old-timey fiddle tunes prettied up with sophisticated harmonies and with some attempt to draw them out into a serious structure. It is in that last regard that he fails – in this new American Seasons and in other works on disc, the “Fiddle Concerto” and a few chamber works. As a violinist he manages another synthesis; his stylistic swings from Corelli to country were smooth, if you like that kind of thing; to me they were sickening.

Any piece of music that earns my respect – a large number, I hasten to assure you – begins with a secret message that tells me what I need to know about shape, length and proportion. Each of the four concertos in Vivaldi’s Seasons accomplishes this most eloquently, heralding not an hour’s length of the same thing, but four 15-minute varied episodes on a shapely landscape. The clouds out of which Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony takes shape tell us that the ensuing structure will be vast; the same revelatory power holds for any great work you can name. The failure in O’Connor’s music the other night was exactly that, a lack of a thread that made me want to anticipate the next thing, the inability of any moment to explain why it’s there and how it got there. Music that cannot explain itself makes me profoundly uncomfortable, and – on Tuesday of last week – it got me homeward bound ahead of time.

Dealing with long pieces of music that have the power to explain themselves leads me logically to Franz Schubert and his piano sonatas – of which pickings were also slim back in the 78-rpm prehistory; in my latest Schwann they fill four columns of very small print. That hasn’t deterred EMI from launching a new series, nor should it. The pianist is the exceptional young Norwegian Leif Ove Andsnes, and his two discs so far have further value in that tenor Ian Bostridge fills in the extra space with Schubert songs, with Andsnes at the piano.

The latest disc offers the D-major Sonata of 1825, and Bostridge’s nine songs come from around that time; it was also the time, three years before his death, when Schubert began work on the “Great” C-major Symphony. The D-major is the first of the five final sonatas, all of them large-scale and personal works. Its origins are fascinating to speculate on. He is obviously under the spell of Beethoven’s vast “Hammerklavier” Sonata, with its huge handfuls of clangorous chords smashed up against one another, and its dizzy plunges into foreign keys. All this happens in the first movement, mostly at breathtaking speed. The slow movement is different, a fond journey through paradise, its melodies shy and fragmented at first, gradually merging, the junctures accomplished with single soft harmonies for which there are no proper words. The Scherzo starts off like a three-legged clog dance, but the middle section – when played with the serenity that Andsnes commands here – again elicits shivers. The finale is all sunshine and meadows, the evocation of a place and its colors that could teach Mark O’Connor a thing or two about simple gifts.

Andsnes is a marvelous musician; if his slow movement doesn’t yet have the eloquence that, in Mitsuko Uchida’s performance, can melt steel, his own brand of steel in the other movements has a glint that I find irresistible. And then there is Bostridge, with his own poet’s imagination for word-color and word-emotion, and the clear, unforced beauty of his tone; you have to believe that this was the sound that rang in Schubert’s own soul as he put pen to these miraculous outpourings. Andsnes’ collaboration is on a level for which mere “accompanist” will not do. At this writing my ears resound to their partnership on “Auf der Bruck,” with its crashing dissonances in the pianist’s left hand and the singer’s intoxicated exhilaration at his vision of the mountainous landscape that only music can properly describe.