So I've Heard

Twenty years, give or take, separate Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto and Berlioz’s “Fantastic” Symphony; one week separated their presence at the Hollywood Bowl (in very classy performances, if you were wondering). The two works sing in different languages, but they occupy similar positions in the musical annals. Both stand at a crossroads. Beethoven’s vast design, grandest and most complex of his ventures in the classical concerto, carried that genre to its logical point of no return. The young Berlioz, his head full of newly discovered Beethoven (and Shakespeare and Faust), created something in the name of “symphony” that escorted his awestruck audiences to the very gates of hell.

Other composers after Beethoven’s time would try their hand at composing concertos, some even successfully. But the “Emperor” stands alone. Its sheer size commands awe. Its tunes are vast, and they move toward unpredictable new regions. Sometimes there is no tune at all, just a pounding, obsessive rhythm hollered forth by piano and orchestra in turn. Classical harmonic procedures fall by the wayside; after all the triumphant E-flat posturing that fills the first movement’s 20 or so minutes, Beethoven probably frightened his 1809 audience right out of their britches by bringing on the slow movement in a totally unrelated key: B major, five sharps after three flats! At the end of that soft-spoken, divinely beautiful slow interlude, he escorted his dumbfounded listeners back to E-flat with a sudden jolt – no preparation, no smooth transition, no easeful modulation, just BANG! (a soft bang, to be sure, but a shock nonetheless). There are other wonders in store. His finale is built around a skittery sort of tune; perhaps it turns up once too often. But right at the end, he pulls a part of that tune out of context and transforms it into a new obsession – DAH-da-dum, DAH-da-dum over and over – pushing it higher up the scale, wreathing it in harmonies more and more insistent. If you’re looking for a musical illustration of ecstasy at its purest, that bit of Beethovenian peroration will do just fine.

The “Emperor” crowned two evenings at the Bowl in which Jeffrey Kahane, conducting from the piano, led the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in all five of the Beethoven Concertos, a sequence that spanned the 14 years of Beethoven’s conquest of the musical world. Kahane and his wonderful small orchestra have done the cycle before, indoors; on two nights at the Bowl, irradiated by a couple of the Almighty’s superior sunsets (and with only one intruding bit of aircraft), and with the smallish orchestra – four stands of first violins instead of the Philharmonic’s six, four cellos instead of eight – Beethoven’s remarkable wind scoring seemed the right match for those evenings’ benevolent, balmy air. Notable, too, was Kahane’s own conception of his place in the scheme: not as a pounding virtuoso, but as a member of an idealized chamber ensemble. A mashed note now and then, a scale passage ever so slightly out of focus, these detracted not at all from the eloquent music-making.

The “Fantastic” ended Esa-Pekka Salonen’s last of three programs “previewing” the Philharmonic’s brief visit to the Edinburgh Festival; other Berlioz – the “Royal Hunt and Storm” music from Les Troyens – began the evening; both works served as good company for Salonen’s own LA Variations midway. Salonen’s music wears well. There are new discoveries on each rehearing, and it would not be insolent to suggest that Salonen himself may also be learning more about the work as he goes along. The inner structure – the dovetailing and the contrasts that create the sense of “variations” – demands, and rewards, a certain amount of hard work. This is genuinely great music, however, a sense now widely corroborated by reports from beyond the mountains.

Berlioz has become, for Salonen, congenial territory. Here is a conductor who knows the music’s extraordinary range of color – the way a single note from the strings can shine a light upon a wind passage, the way the harps, in the “Fantastic”’s waltz movement, become the dancers’ jewels, the horrors outlined at terrifying distances by the snarling trombones at the gates of Hades. An outdoor “Fantastic” puts amplifying systems to a cruel test, and the sound of the performance under Salonen at times only suggested the depths of the orchestra’s command of the music. One awaits further proof; if Salonen and Berlioz are made for each other, surely the new sounds at Disney can only seal the relationship.

Indoors, there was some quieter
French music at the County Museum, in an evening of piano duets as a pendant to LACMA’s current Belle Epoque exhibition centering around the seductive, flowing lines of Modigliani’s paintings. Vicki Ray and Joanne Pearce Martin chose well; indeed, there is music from that time that catches most abundantly the insidious play of line and color in those magical roomfuls upstairs at LACMA. Ravel’s Mother Goose always sounds better in its original piano-duet scoring; enough of the color is inherent in those intricate lines to create a full range of sound in the ears of any imaginative listener. There was, perhaps, too little Satie that evening; I would have been happier with his Pieces in the Shape of a Pear than the too-brief En Habit de Cheval . . . maybe next time. Darius Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur le Toit was the evening’s most substantial work, and the evening’s show-stealer at that. Its comedy remains delicious, its giggling delight at its own discovery of Latin jazz makes even its obsessive repetitiousness seem too short. Bits and pieces of Stravinsky’s doodling filled in around the edges, as did Poulenc’s 1918 Sonata, a lesser work, overshadowed by his later piece for two pianos.

Indoors, too, in the airless reaches of Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theater, this summer’s Music Academy of the West Festival ended with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro in as close-to-perfect a small-scale production as never mind. A young cast had been finely drilled, by a faculty with Marilyn Horne at the top, in everything worth knowing about Mozart’s sublime comedy: the exact cadences of Lorenzo da Ponte’s airborne Italian, the flow of emotion that merges heartbreak into joy, chicanery into resourcefulness. Even the conducting of Randall Behr, obviously in happier circumstances at Santa Barbara than in his days at the Los Angeles Opera, had snap and sparkle and a fine sense of ensemble. Some superior vocal and dramatic training shone forth in the work of every member of the cast, and I left wondering how many Figaro performances I have attended of which I could say as much.

Strange are the workings of the Fates. A couple of weeks ago, as I rummaged through the collected writings of Olin Downes in search of his adulatory bloviations on the matter of Jan Sibelius, the telephone rang with the news of Harold Schonberg’s death. Olin Downes had been chief music critic at The New York Times from 1923 to 1955. Harold Schonberg had held that post from 1960 to 1980. It was Harold who had given me my first leg up in New York; I was at the Times for two years starting in 1961 until the Herald-Tribune made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Everybody knew that the Trib was close to the end of its illustrious lifetime, but Harold rightly insisted that I take the job – “if only,” he said, “so that I can be writing against a pro for once.” We were on good terms then, but that didn’t last. Harold didn’t take to being disagreed with in print; he didn’t, for example, like being ragged about his famous disemboweling of Glenn Gould on the day of the Brahms Concerto. (“Maybe the reason he plays it so slow,” Harold had written in a strange and ill-conceived review couched in an affected East European accent, “is that his technique is not so good.”)

Enthroned at the Times, Harold was
the last of a breed, of critics at that august journal whose power over lives – of rising young musicians, of established virtuosos and of composers native-born or imported – was that of chief justice or, at times, of Lord High Executioner. The breed had achieved its first full glory in the time of Olin Downes, who never wrote alone but always as half of the team known as the “editorial we.” The Almighty God was the other half. Downes had first wielded his scepter at the Boston Post as long ago as 1906, when Boston and New York were pretty much cultural equals. He held his throne when Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini shared the Metropolitan Opera podium, when Richard Strauss was the dangerous young upstart and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring boded ill for the future of mankind.

Downes found greater comfort in the lush upholstery of the Sibelius orchestra. He heard Debussy’s La Mer at its American premiere with misgivings (“to us this music lacks the vast, elemental tone”); he found more to praise in the clear-eyed neoclassicism of Ravel. No critic in this country – and perhaps only Eduard Hanslick in Europe – held so much power while so much of the substance of classical repertory was taking shape. At the end, music had pretty much left him behind. In 1948, in the collected writings, there is a pathetic exchange of correspondence between Downes and Arnold Schoenberg, brought on by the former’s abject detestation of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony: the one correspondent unable to cope with where music had gotten to in Mahler’s late works, the other unable to cope with the possibility that criticism might consist of the “nay” as well as the “yea.”

Harold dissolved the partnership of the “editorial we,” but he could never go as far as identifying himself in the first person singular. He imposed an absurd clumsiness whereby the “I” in an interview always had to be “a visitor,” and until late in his hegemony you couldn’t use the word cello without preceding it with an apostrophe. He had one other bugaboo, which may have cost the musical world some important critical thinking. The notion that a critic could also be a composer was anathema to him; never mind the precedents set by Berlioz, Schumann, Debussy and others. He couldn’t accept the possibility of a fair hearing by one practitioner of another’s work, and in at least one instance while I was at the Times, he obliged a writer of exceptional brilliance, and of the exceptional insight into contemporary music that Harold himself lacked, to choose between hats and, therefore, to leave the Times. (One of the first things I did at the Trib was to give that writer-composer, Eric Salzman, a job.)

He did, of course, have support for his attitude. Back in the 1940s and ’50s, the Trib had a staff of critics that was a veritable beehive of composers: Virgil Thomson as the queen bee, and Lou Harrison, Arthur Berger, Paul Bowles among the workers. (Interesting trivia note: Berger, Harold and I were all, at one time in our careers, part-timers for the long-gone, unremembered New York Sun.) Thomson did, indeed, gain somewhat naughtily from his position; performances of his own music became much more frequent after his accession, and performers who favored his music got to see their names in print more often than before. (Look at Betty Freeman’s photograph; this is the glare of a man you don’t mess with, or dare to ignore.) Was this blatant misuse of power on Thomson’s part? Maybe so, maybe no; more important, it seems to me, is the wisdom contained in Virgil Thomson’s collected writings, the insights of a man who, from his own vantage point well inside the art of music, was therefore singularly well equipped to penetrate everything around him. (Thomson’s writings, by the way, are still in print; those of Olin Downes are not.)

Harold’s writings are also still in print, though not, alas, his one collection of Times reviews. But there are books on performers – pianists, conductors, Vladimir Horowitz – that underscore the greatest of his passions, the indefinable dynamic that makes one performer sublime and another a klutz. Another of his arguable phobias was the notion of critics and performers becoming friends; there was more to be gained, he claimed, by avoiding the appearance of conflict of interest than by learning one another’s innards. His personal Great Exception, by the way, was his vaunted pride in having played piano duets with Horowitz – whose name, by the way, no junior critic at the Times was ever allowed even to whisper in print. (Heifetz, too, fell under that rubric, but that’s another story.) Harold loved everything about the piano, everything about romantic, flamboyant musicianship (Jorge Bolet, sí; Alfred Brendel, no). Baseball was another passion, and he could rattle on about today’s World Series game while typing out a letter-perfect 600-word review in no time flat.

Anatole France described criticism as “the adventures of the mind among masterpieces.” Writing about Harold’s adventuring, I see I’ve used the word passion quite a lot. There is no other way.

Tod Machover’s Hyperstring Trilogy, on the Oxingale label and by some distance the most exhilarating disc release of these otherwise drab summer months, sets off memories of the not-too-distant past and stirs up all kinds of hopes for a not-too-hopeless future. Riffling through my old writings, from when this publication and I were 10 years younger, I came across a lot of gee-whiz prose about a fantastic toy shop called the Electronic Café, where a pianist on a stage in Santa Monica got to play duets with somebody in Santa Fe or New York, and where dancers and musicians, strung up with several miles of cable and connected to wondrous, flickering machinery, could take two steps to the right and bring about a cataclysm of electronic sound. Tod Machover took part in these events, a curly-topped moppet recently back from a stint at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM in Paris. In Santa Monica, if memory serves, Machover showed off a fabulous wired glove whose wearer only had to think about wriggling a pinkie and musical hell would break loose.

I don’t remember whether any of the stuff at the now-defunct Electronic Café had much to do with good or bad music, and I don’t think it mattered; the gadgetry was fascinating enough. Machover – now installed as the head of the Media Lab at MIT – has continued to invent, especially in the area where certain time-honored performance techniques interact with computer technology to produce a range of sound light-years beyond what a normal cello, viola and violin could produce on their own. The new disc contains three extensive works by Machover for those instruments – a solo piece for “hypercello,” a work for “hyperviola” with computer-manipulated voice and a small ensemble of “live” instruments, a work for “hyperviolin” and chamber orchestra. These are works of considerable extent, and the most important thing about them is that they are also powerful, intense, beautiful music.

Machover, himself a cellist, is therefore something of a romantic. His operas so far include a brilliant, disturbing setting of the Philip K. Dick sci-fi fantasy Valis for which the orchestra includes several hyperinstruments; a Brain Opera that creates itself inside the head of whoever is watching it at the time; and a rather lush setting of Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection, full of retro orchestral effects and arias. Begin Again Again . . ., the 21-minute work for solo hypercello on the new disc (played by Matt Haimovitz), has something of this stylistic sweep; most of all it is a deeply expressive work, something that gets into your blood and tells you that it is possible to draw upon the most sophisticated technology the lab guys at MIT can concoct and still shape a moving, communicative musical art. Kim Kashkashian is the solo violist in Song of Penance (with Rose Moss’ poetry intoned by Karol Bennett); Ani Kavafian, noble veteran of the new-music wars, is the violinist in the third work, Forever and Ever. Sure, having the playing of all three musicians drastically modified by this computer stuff makes it a little difficult to praise their performances in normal critical terminology; it’s like reviewing champion swimmers who rely on water wings. Whatever, the technical mastery on this disc is breathtaking, and so is the music.

While we’re on the subject of indefinability, consider Clogs, a kind of chamber group that has come to my attention, with one disc out on the Brassland label and another due out next week. Australia’s Padma Newsome is the group’s founder, chief composer and violinist/violist; guitarist/composer Bryce Dessner, percussionist Thomas Kozumplik and – if you’re ready – bassoonist Rachael Elliott complete the group. They have a date at the Temple Bar in Santa Monica later this month.

Okay, so here is a quartet of excellently proficient, classical-trained musicians who create a repertory not quite like anything already out there. Jazz tints their musical style, yet events like 6’33” of quiet, free-flowing beauty in a rapturous duet for bassoon and viola over the insistent plink of steel drums – in the title cut of their disc called Thom’s Night Out – don’t readily fit into journalistic pigeonholes. (Must they?) The group is on the move; a recent commissioning grant from Chamber Music America puts them in cahoots with Ingram Marshall, another indefinable composer. Anyhow, I love this new disc of theirs, most of all for its still, nicely controlled sensibility – even if I don’t quite know where it goes on my shelves.

Extempore II, from Harmonia Mundi, is even stranger, and no less lovable. It is a collaborative effort between England’s Orlando Consort, a vocal quartet (countertenor, tenors, baritone) with a following for their early-music performances, and Perfect Houseplants, a jazz quartet (prepared piano, winds, percussion, bass). “Oh, oh,” you can say with some justice; the graveyards are well-supplied with those who would cross over between musical styles and between millennia. And that is exactly what happens here. The plan is to concoct a latter-day Mass for the Feast of St. Michael, following along the outlines of a medieval Mass and also – as with frequent ancient practice – including a well-known song of the time as a structural element within the Mass. The song is the famous “L’Homme Armé,” a hit-parade item circa 1350, and these Orlando Houseplants aren’t the first group to use that song in modern times; there’s also a setting by Peter Maxwell Davies. This one is a lot more fun.

What makes it so is that these performers – the singers, of course, but also the jazz combo – perform with a real awareness of what made this music tick for the churchgoers of the distant past, and what it needs to be made to tick today. There is a fine, elegant slitheriness in the parallel movements of archaic harmonies (“fauxbourdon,” you remember from Music 101) and an exaltation in the outbursts of “Alleluia” that keep things moving. No, this kind of crossover activity doesn’t answer the problem of how to bring medieval music to life in contemporary jazz clubs. All I can say is that this project is the work of honest, enthusiastic musicians bridging what used to be regarded as an unbridgeable chasm. The result is 62 minutes of music not at all disgraceful and – as a matter of fact – decidedly not bad.

“There is the feeling of the vasty deep,” wrote Olin Downes in the days when music critics coined not only phrases but actual words, “of the thresh of waters and the sough of winds . . .” At the Hollywood Bowl, the 10 minutes of Sibelius’ seascape The Oceanides, which had inspired such lexicographical ecstasies from the redoubtable Downes, turned out as tiresome as any expanse of Sibelius on land; for once I found myself praying for an intruding aircraft. I suppose that something or other by Sibelius was ordained as an Esa-Pekka calling card; last week’s programs at the Bowl were part of the Philharmonic’s luggage that Salonen has packed for its upcoming week’s visit to the Edinburgh Festival, and there are, after all, longer – and therefore even more tiresome – works than The Oceanides that might have been chosen instead. On Thursday’s program the Sibelius was followed by Debussy’s La Mer, and while that superlative piece of maritime tone painting needed no further assistance from such humble precincts, I have never been more grateful for its arrival than I was that night, or admired it more and with better reason.

You have to accord Sibelius some place of importance in the cultural firmament, for his efforts in defining his country’s awareness of its roots by creating music in the Finnish language rather than the more acceptable Swedish. Where no musician of quality had existed in Finland before, Sibelius loomed large; he still does. The remarkable measure of support offered today by the Finnish government to young musicians is directly traceable to the nation’s pride in its first major musical celebrity. Without that background, we mightn’t so easily be afforded the enormous talents of today’s Finnish generation: Salonen, Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho. I can’t imagine that any of them – trained in Paris, where Sibelius’ music earns its well-deserved neglect – hold this music close to their respective souls. But devoting 10 minutes to the gray, meandering wisps of The Oceanides can be reckoned, for Salonen, reasonable dues. Nary a note of Sibelius figures in Salonen’s own programming for his first season at Disney Hall; the Seventh Symphony is on the list, but the performance is by the visiting Berlin Philharmonic.

The Berlin Philharmonic performing Sibelius? That, too, seems like a violation of stereotype; yet here is a three-disc Deutsche Grammophon set, in the low-price “Trio” packaging, with all seven of the symphonies in reissued strong, idiomatic performances by the Finnish-born Okko Kamu and – surprise! – the formidable Herbert von Karajan. The set has one flaw, but it’s a serious one: The Fourth Symphony, by far the best of the seven, especially for its power to hold a hearer in an unrelaxed icy grip, is divided between two discs. Sure, I grew up in the days when you changed record sides every four minutes; now, however, I’m spoiled, and this split – especially inflicted on this symphony and on Karajan’s extraordinary performance – indicates some pretty dumb thinking somewhere in the industry.

Salonen’s calling cards for this first of his two Bowl weeks also included worthier stuff: Ravel and Debussy beaucoup and a remarkably strong, dry-point rendition of the complete Stravinsky Petrouchka. A complete Ravel Daphnis et Chloë, however, is a mixed blessing. Every measure is gorgeously scored – especially when, as last week, the performance includes the wordless chorus. Quite a lot of the first 35 of its 50 minutes, however, consists of purely functional ballet music designed to get dancers from one spot on the stage to another. (I have to confess similar feelings about complete Firebird performances.) Then come those last 15 minutes – which live independently as the “Suite No. 2” – and the sky catches fire; there are individual measures in that sequence that are like nothing else in music, and the cold and rational Salonen, in whose veins the vasty thresh of Sibelius soughs and throbs, lights lights under this music better than anyone I know.

Some of this, of course, I report on faith, or on memories of previous encounters indoors. There is no way of pretending that Salonen’s marvelous realization of the exquisite scoring of Daphnis, or of Debussy’s Nocturnes or La Mer, for all the caress of summertime breezes up in Cahuenga Pass, has anything to do with the sound of that music in real life. The sound of classical music at the Bowl is a magnificent fraud, and has been since the first microphones were installed, and will continue to be even if the new construction of the orchestral shell passes muster as an acoustic miracle.

Classical music was composed to be performed in rooms: the salon of a Viennese aristocrat, the first concert hall open to a ticket-buying audience, the 3,000-seat monsters like the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Its sound is shaped by the orchestra or chorus onstage, but it is shaped as well by the walls, floor, ceiling and the collective physiognomy of the people in the hall. If I write, as I have over the years, that the sound at the Hollywood Bowl is pretty good – I may have even written “excellent” somewhere along the line – that is only within the scope that music traveling through unenclosed air, from loudspeakers carefully placed or from the stage, still exists without the crucial shaping force that is designed by acoustical engineers and architects under million-dollar contracts. That said, I have to take notice of the swirl of gossip, rumors and firsthand reports on the state of affairs currently at Disney Hall downtown. Unlike normal summertime procedures, Salonen and the Philharmonic have been rehearsing their Bowl programs (which are also their tour programs) in their new downtown hall. The reports from players, who have a lot more insight – and a lot more at stake – range from favorable to ecstatic. Stay tuned.

Something about La Traviata, fragrant creation from Verdi’s early mastery, takes hold no matter what. At the Los Angeles Opera it has survived several reruns of Marta Domingo’s clumsy staging; Linda Brovsky’s San Francisco Opera production, brought down to Costa Mesa’s Opera Pacific in 1999, restored Verdi’s lost lady to musical respectability. John Mauceri conducted then, and Elizabeth Futral was the Violetta. Both were on hand again at the Hollywood Bowl last week; even without staging, and with a supporting cast of variable quality, the wonder of this most heartwarming of all romantic operas lingered in the muggy air like a two-and-a-half-hour caress.

None of Verdi’s other wonderful operas has as much power as this one to undo a listener’s complacency and activate the tear ducts. The emotional impact is easily explained – up to a point, at any rate. Verdi’s audiences in the 1850s were shocked at an opera set in the present, with 1850 costumes in 1850 Paris; after Traviata, another half-century went by before another composer succeeded with a close-to-the-bone tragedy of its own time and place: Puccini in La Bohème. Any performance of either work that doesn’t draw buckets of tears at its final curtain must be reckoned a failure. Last week’s Traviata was a noble success.

One scene serves my purpose whenever someone asks for proof of what’s so great about opera. Alfredo and Violetta are blissfully tucked away in their countryside retreat; enter Alfredo’s father to pour cold water on their ménage. Their sinful existence, he informs Violetta, has stirred up scandal among the folks back home and threatens the marriage of Alfredo’s young sister. The old man is horribly obtuse to the possibility that Alfredo and Violetta might actually be in love; Verdi’s jagged, sour music exudes sarcasm and ill will. Of all Verdian villains – the Count in Il Trovatore, Carlo in La Forza del Destino, down the roster of loud baritones – Papa Germont is the one you really want to kick, the one whose meanness is interwoven with stupidity.

He is adamant; knock it off, he tells Violetta, there are plenty of studs around for her playpen. She is devastated. In what has to be the most melancholy waltz tune ever conceived (“Ah, dite alla giovine . . .”), she capitulates to his demands. In phrases cynical and unfeeling, he tells her to go ahead and weep. He leaves. Violetta must compose a farewell note to Alfredo, but she cannot find the words. In her place a solo clarinet in the orchestra pit continues the lament. Fortunate is the lover, past or present, who can hear those few minutes of utter bleakness in the opera house without an onrush of a bitter personal memory. That’s what opera can do to you, if you let it.

The Bowl is hardly the opera house of anyone’s dreams. The singers were spread across downstage, on either side of Mauceri; the chorus was up back. There was no chance of re-creating the lovely effect in Act 1, when the dance band at Violetta’s party is supposed to be heard offstage. (Maybe, in the new Bowl . . .) As compensation, however, Mauceri’s robust, nicely paced performance opened some of the cuts that ill-advised conductors still observe: Alfredo’s cabaletta at the start of Act 2, Germont’s at the act’s end, repeats of Violetta’s “Addio del passato” and “Parigi, o cara” in the last act. Futral – remember her Handel’s Cleopatra with the nudie milk bath? – was again, as in Costa Mesa, a dream Violetta, elegant in her coloratura, intense in her tragedy. Frank Lopardo was the bright, powerful Alfredo; Earle Patriarco, a Germont with a fine sense of drama but not much voice.

Word is out; all the Disney Hall hoo-ha obscures the other new piece of concert architecture in the offing. Shortly after the end of this Bowl season, the wrecking ball moves in on the orchestral shell. June 14, 2004, is the latest target date to inaugurate the new shell, designed by the Los Angeles firm of (Craig) Hodgetts and (Hsin Ming) Fung. This is already two years later than the original plan; a woefully misguided protest advanced the notion that the current shell, in use since 1929 and subjected to several architectural changes since then, was a sacred landmark demanding preservation of the same rank as the Chinese Theater’s footprints and the Hollywood Sign. An organization called Hollywood Heritage Inc., headed by a certain Robert Nudelman, filled the air with pious absurdities that vested the structure with sacrosanct status. The fight has been in the courts almost constantly since September 2000, when the county Board of Supervisors passed Zev Yaroslavsky’s motion to replace the crumbling and acoustically lousy structure.

Mr. Nudelman’s 15 minutes of fame was based on the ludicrous premise that the current Bowl is somehow worth saving. The present structure, the fourth one in that space, was by far the least interesting of the four; earlier attempts, including one designed by Lloyd Wright (Frank Lloyd’s son), had some kind of design personality. Structure No. 4 has undergone drastic changes over the years, including additions (later subtracted) by Frank Gehry. If anything, the new design – without all those Styrofoam balls that turn the stage housing into a mockup of the Starship Enterprise – returns the look of the Bowl stage to the 1929 original, except that the stage is now more spacious, and choristers won’t have to be jammed against the back wall (as they were for La Traviata).

Zev Yaroslavsky, the latest story goes, recently visited the Bowl structure and broke off a piece with his hand. It might be a nice tribute, and save a few bucks, if he could finish the job on his own.

Photo by James Minchen

The timing was, as usual, immaculate. Only one aircraft penetrated the space over the Hollywood Bowl on opening night of the Tuesday/Thursday “classical” series, but that transgression occurred during the evening’s quietest moment. In the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, there is a point when the simplistic, throbbing principal theme disintegrates down to a couple of notes that simply chase each other against a background of silence; eventually this activity takes on the shape of a fugue (which is, after all, another word for “chase”), and there is a swift, ferocious buildup. It’s a wonderful moment, but it’s the one we didn’t get to hear that night. Oh well, here we go again; I love the Bowl and so should you, but there are those problems . . .

Actually, this was one of the better Bowl evenings, and the size of the crowd – 7,500 or thereabouts – was above the Tuesday average. The high-flash piano whiz-bang Jean-Yves Thibaudet showed up in a suit, all shine and glitter, that exactly matched the music he got to play, the shine and glitter of Franz Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto. What distasteful music, these 20 or so minutes of empty exploitation of a shapeless tune, now fast and now slow now loud and now even louder! The young Thibaudet managed its banalities with steady hands; at the end one knew no more about his musical qualities than 20 minutes before; the paltry applause barely allowed for a solo bow.

Young Andreas Delfs conducted; he is German-born, currently head of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Milwaukee Symphony. I had few kind words for his Philharmonic debut at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion last year (Mozart, plus a new and empty-headed piece by Theodore Shapiro – remember?); all the greater, therefore, was his triumph at the Bowl this time around. The Beethoven Seventh is glorious, action-packed music, but that’s not the same as stating that the work can conduct itself. Aside from the usual Bowl practice of ignoring the composer-specified repeats, this was a strong, knowing performance, clear and brave and, allowing for the usual acoustic drawbacks, responsive to the work’s astonishingly broad range of sonority. (That range, I might as well confess, includes one of my favorite single notes in all music: the first horn’s blazing high E at the very end of the first movement. The Philharmonic’s William Lane did that note, and this grateful listener, proud.)

A smart performance of a Beethoven symphony always sends me home with the compulsion to write, write, write about Beethoven, and so it was this time. Everybody knows that not one of these nine works sounds like any other; what I find even more remarkable is that not one of the symphonies solves its own problems in the same way. The Fifth is extraordinary in its self-obsession; the Sixth, in its discursiveness; the Eighth, in its fond revisiting of ancestral models. The Seventh is a succession of irresistible crescendos, tidal waves, perhaps. The great recorded performances – Toscanini with the New York Philharmonic in 1936, Szell with the Cleveland in 1963, Harnoncourt with his own orchestra in 1990 – re-create that succession, and leave you exalted and drenched. Every movement seems to begin out of nowhere and build irresistibly. In the first movement it happens twice: in the spacious introduction, which takes you to the edge of a chasm and leaves you there, and the movement itself, which starts with the merest thread and jerks you constantly and violently until that culminating high E lands you safely ashore. In some way each of the ensuing movements works you over in similar fashion until the almost unbearable last few minutes. The low instruments grind out their final menace, and the rest of the orchestra, virtually aflame, becomes something you even feel in your teeth.

You don’t need me to write about Beethoven; the bookshelf is well-stocked. Lewis Lockwood’s The Music and the Life of Beethoven (W.W. Norton, $39.95) is a recent arrival, and an excellent one. It is the latest in a long line of fat volumes that bravely attempt a synthesis between the questions in Beethoven’s pain-haunted life and the answers that might lurk within the music. The most honorable of these ——–
AUTHORs – and Lockwood is one, along with (among others) Maynard Solomon in 1977 and Alexander Wheelock Thayer in 1866 – quickly come to realize that synthesis is impossible. The lifeline of Beethoven himself, and the lifeline of the 138 opus numbers that make up his staggering legacy, intersect only sporadically and then inconclusively. How do we match up the Seventh Symphony, with its gigantic outbursts of sheer joviality, the pounding rhythms of dancers not yet choreographed, with the composer whose hearing was virtually gone, whose abdominal distress and bronchial trauma were constant companions?

Lockwood is an excellent companion, as we struggle with, and then reject, the need to answer such questions. His account of Beethoven’s life, the society in which he moved, the dealings with publishers and performers to get his music attended to, manages with considerable grace to keep in front of us the awareness of the unfathomable genius about whom this history is being told. As often as we have heard the account of the “Eroica” Symphony, the planned dedication to Napoleon Bonaparte and the erasure of that dedication, Lockwood tells the story particularly well. Best of all, in his near-600 pages on the vagaries and products of genius, he keeps us close to Beethoven’s own awareness of what he is about. We know today that the “Eroica”’s explosive implications – the intensity of its language and the vastness of its design – changed the nature of music for all time. What we might forget, however, is that Beethoven himself knew what he had accomplished, in this work and across the realm of his creativity: that the “Eroica” in its time was “the greatest work I have yet written.” The image of the innocent genius, on whose shoulders the hand of God gently rests, makes for good film scripts and music appreciation CD-ROMs; this splendid new book, accessible and reader-friendly as it is, tells of battles hard fought and won, and thereby tells the truth.

Thanks to the separate efforts of the record company called Naxos and the Web site–cum–magazine known as Andante-dot-com, recorded music’s past appears in better shape than its present – and probably its future as well. I wrote last week about Naxos and its superb reissues at bargain prices of gone but unforgotten repertory. Since there hasn’t been all that much live music-making around here lately, let me now tell you more about Andante, whose discs sell for almost twice the price of eight-buck Naxos but whose packaging is a lot fancier, with virtually a whole tome of printed information – including Tim Page’s eloquent invocations – before you even get to the music.

Andante’s recorded repertory stretches serendipity to new heights. Some of it is from the heyday of the 78-rpm disc; some comes from broadcast tapes found in European archives. Out of the latter comes a marvelous Marriage of Figaro from the 1937 Salzburg Festival, conducted by Bruno Walter in an outpouring of energy nothing like the work of his mellow late years. Ezio Pinza’s Figaro in those days was one of the world’s authentic wonders; Jarmila Novotná’s Cherubino wasn’t far behind.

Somebody at Andante must harbor an irrational affection for the rampages of the mercurial Leopold Stokowski in his golden ascendancy; the Andante catalog is a rich trove of his escapades: the “symphonic syntheses” he concocted out of the Wagner music dramas (with, of all people, the musical and Hit Parade star Lawrence Tibbett as Wotan), the vast Technicolor fantasies he drew from Bach’s organ works. There’s a three-disc collection of Willem Mengelberg leading his Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, dating back to the early days of electrical recording. His 1929 performance of Liszt’s Les Preludes, with his white-hot brass echoing through Amsterdam’s great hall, will curl your hair; I can only hope that Disney Hall will sound that good.

But the Andante album that I most want placed in my pyramid is a four-disc set of chamber music by Franz Schubert, with performances dating from 1926 to 1944: both piano trios, the “Trout” Quintet, the C-major Quintet for strings, the Octet, the two big works for violin and piano plus one of the lesser sonatas. Every one of these works has been recorded many times over; I cannot abandon these pristine renditions, nor could I the Emersons’ recording of the C-major Quintet (with Rostropovich as the extra cellist) or the Melos Ensemble’s Octet. My amazement at the elegance and passion of Fritz Kreisler and Sergei Rachmaninoff at work on the A-major Violin Sonata is stronger than the appeal any later performance of that music could extend.

These are the recordings that won me to Schubert’s music in the first place, and hearing them again – nicely cleaned to extract the last overtone from those ancient grooves – is like renewing a whole string of old romances. The loving is in the performances themselves. Take the incredible rendition of the Octet, in a recording dating from 1928. The strings are the Léner Quartet from Budapest. They are real Hungarians, and Hungarian is the way they play – above all in the melting slides to give Schubert’s seductive tunes their ultimate impact. The wind players are all Brits, including the legendary hornist Aubrey Brain. The blend of musical languages is complete; there is an impulse in this performance, clearly audible under 75 years of dust, that makes you believe that all eight of those splendid gentlemen could not possibly have wanted to be anywhere else but in that London studio on that day in March 1928.

The C-major String Quintet is performed, in 1935, by another renowned ensemble, the Pro Arte Quartet of Brussels, with Anthony Pini as the second cellist. There are 32 performances of this sovereign work in my latest Schwann, and many, I must admit, are extraordinary. (How, for that matter, could anyone become involved in this music and not rise high?) The Pro Arte Quartet, formed in 1912, was busy in the recording studios right up to WWII, after which some of the members immigrated to the United States. Their manner tended toward the suave and unruffled; I love the way they mesh with Artur Schnabel’s twinkling piano in the “Trout” Quintet on the first disc of this album. Even so, I don’t know another recording that so compellingly conveys the breathtaking beauty of that endless slow melody that begins the slow movement of Schubert’s C-major Quintet, the shattering change midway to a drastically different key, and then the melody’s return under the persistent echoes of that interruption. Listen to that music, and try to tell me – as many writers have – that Schubert knew nothing about musical form. (One flaw in Andante’s Schubert album is the error-ridden essay by Paul Turok, who claims, for example, that the first movement of this quintet has no development section. What else, friend Paul, do you call the seething drama in bars 155–266 of that beautifully formed movement?)

The B-flat Piano Trio, played by the Jacques Thibaud–Pablo Casals–Alfred Cortot trio, whose Beethoven “Archduke” Trio I wrote about last week, is duplicated on Naxos and the Andante album. This is, to my taste, the finest of all that “celebrity” trio’s performances, the one that allows violinist Thibaud to sing at the top of his lung power and cellist Casals to demonstrate the superhuman legato of his bowing arm. The E-flat Trio is performed by Adolph Busch, Hermann Busch and Rudolf Serkin, a bit stolidly. The two trios were composed only a few weeks apart; they are unalike in ways that should further confirm anyone’s estimate of Schubert’s strengths as a composer of instrumental music. The B-flat Trio rides along on an endless flow of melody – tunes, actually; coming in 1827, a year before its composer’s death, it can count as Schubert’s last totally happy work. The E-flat Trio, from a few weeks later, is sterner stuff, fascinating in its sudden shifts from “bright” keys – E flat, certainly – to the somber regions of B minor, and including as its slow movement something that could pass as a funeral march.

The restrictions of the original 78-rpm recording, with individual sides running four and a half minutes at most, are evident in these performances. Even in music as broadly conceived as these enchantingly garrulous, discursive works, observing Schubert’s specified repeats would have made them seem shorter. Every note is precious.

Read a chapter or two of Remembrance of Things Past, or watch the wonderful movie (Time Regained). Nibble on a plate of madeleines dipped in lime-leaf tea; now you’re ready to listen to the singing of Maggie Teyte.

Her dates are 1888–1976; she was already singing, and recording, long before Proust began his mighty roman-fleuve. Born Margaret Tate in Wolverhampton, she settled in France as a self-willed teenager and, in 1907, studied the role of Debussy’s Mélisande under Debussy himself. From him she not only gleaned the essence of that role, but also insight into the prosody and indigenousness of its language. She sang Mélisande in Paris, in London and in New York (at age 60, perhaps unwisely). She recorded extensively, starting in 1908 – that old parlor number, “Because” – but the cream of her recording activity came in the 1930s, when she and the great French pianist Alfred Cortot produced the discs of Debussy songs that will forever remain the standard for the way those songs must be performed. Those old 78s are now the nucleus of a two-disc Naxos “Vocal Portrait,” which I urge upon anyone who needs convincing that sung French – what they call la musique de la langue – belongs among the world’s most beautiful sounds.

Teyte was unique, her voice the sound of an idealized oboe, her sense of phrase like a loving whisper into an attentive ear. Debussy, at work with the poets of his time – Baudelaire and Verlaine, above all – was able to create in his songs lines of beauty seemingly fragile but actually of enormous tensile strength. I have heard them sung in more lustrous tones by singers of today – Susan Graham, for example. But listening to Teyte – the irresistible seduction of her voice and the fine resonance of Cortot’s piano splendidly restored by Naxos’ Ward Marston – is to sense a unique bond rare in the annals of recorded performance. These are songs to be heard in a room otherwise quiet, because what they really do is transfigure the very nature of silence.

There are other treasures on this extraordinary Naxos set: a moment from Offenbach’s La Périchole, Ravel’s Shéhérazade, two songs from Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’Été (abridged, alas, to accord with the original 78-rpm issue), several songs by Reynaldo Hahn, whose friendship Teyte enjoyed, and even a duet with the great Irish tenor John McCormack. Blessings again upon Naxos for keeping alive the sense that once prevailed, that records were important.

Alfred Cortot shows up on other Naxos discs, as a participant in chamber performances – Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn – with equally legendary companions: the violinist Jacques Thibaud and the cellist Pablo Casals. The three had started playing together in 1905, mostly just for fun; by 1925 they were a touring ensemble, selling out concert halls throughout Europe. Their repertory was small – only one Haydn trio out of dozens, three of Beethoven’s seven trios – but their artistry was apparently enough to sell tickets whenever they showed up. Their last performance was in 1934; soon after, the old friends split apart, separated among the political currents that had swept the European landscape. On three Naxos discs, you’ll find their entire recorded repertory.

Nobody plays like this anymore, and maybe someone should. On a Beethoven disc, listen to the hot insistence of Thibaud’s violin near the start of the “Archduke” Trio: the controlled but blatant romanticism of his portamento (sliding) to instill a dimension of urgency to his phrasing. Listen to the rich rubato as Cortot shapes the opening of that work, and to the Casals pizzicato like rushes of blood, later in that movement. By contemporary attitudes toward “historically informed” practice, these performances are all wrong; yet what I hear in their work – in the trio and also in the rush of passion in the Thibaud/Cortot “Kreutzer” Sonata on the same disc – is the playing of musicians so in love with their music that scholarly matters of correctitude seem beside the point.

Meanwhile, back in the 21st century: The enterprising label known as ECM, Munich-based, continues to broaden our awareness of the contemporary world with music unknown, indefinable and unforgettable. All three epithets certainly apply to a new disc of music by Valentin Silvestrov, handsomely played by the pianist Alexei Lubimov and an orchestra under Dennis Russell Davis, and – as is usual with ECM – gorgeously packaged. Silvestrov, born in Kiev in 1937, began his career as the chains had loosened around Soviet composers; already in the 1960s, his music had reached Pierre Boulez in Paris. Two big works fill the new disc: Postludium (a “symphonic poem”) from 1984 and Metamusik (a “symphony”) from 1992; both involve piano and large orchestra.

This is powerful, thrilling music, for reasons that require some hard listening. Musically, the two works, which are thematically related, are all over the place: Huge, thick orchestral orations and perorations give way to robust, intensely romantic melodic outpourings. The piano tone swirls through the dense orchestra, seldom proposing any important material on its own, but serving as a chill, commenting wind, perhaps from another world. The program notes are full of pictorial suggestions, and they are quite right: “a breathing tonal web,” “a giant trajectory, like the rising and setting of the sun.” Perhaps Scriabin, if he were alive today, might be writing this kind of music.

Cantaloupe is the house label of Bang on a Can, the New York–based composers’ cooperative that has for several years now made some of the most adventurous music in that benighted city. The new disc offers three string quartets by Julia Wolfe, one of BOAC’s founding spirits, performed by three different ensembles. The quartets have names: Dig Deep, Four Marys and Early That Summer, and I am not qualified to tell you what they mean. The performing groups also have names: Ethel, the Cassatt String Quartet and the Lark Quartet.

Steve Reich is one of BOAC’s guiding lights; his music appears frequently at their famous “marathon” concerts – especially his early minimalist pieces. They provide much of the motive power for these short works of Wolfe, all three of which add up to a skimpy 36 minutes and 44 seconds. The quartets are outwardly alike: big, gritty blocks of still, repeated sonority. Perhaps I have erred in not listening with my amplifier turned up to 11, as the rubrics demand at live BOAC events; prolonged exposure to BOAC’s kick-ass music making can breed discomfort, as Alex Ross noted in a recent New Yorker piece. Still, I found (or think I found) a sense in the last work of moving toward a release, and not a moment too soon.

At the Los Angeles Opera, Don Giovanni sang his seduction music to Zerlina while escorting her toward a blood-red bed built for two. In Long Beach, cops and thugs and modern-day terrorists stalked the streets of 18th-century Peru. In San Francisco, Mephistopheles turned up in Faust’s study sporting a crimson baseball cap, and a modern grand piano figured among the scenic elements in the 16th-century Spain of Verdi’s Il Trovatore. Up and down the West Coast, the gloom of June has been pierced by flashes of misguided genius, bent on imposing latter-day stage gimmickry on works far better off in their pristine conceptions – attempting to repair the unbroken.

Mind you, I am under no compulsion to argue for the strict staging of operas as set down in their original librettos. Look up the old photographs of Bayreuth productions in Wagner’s day, or Il Trovatore as staged for Caruso; you can practically smell the dust. Contemporary stage technology enables miracles of stagecraft that set forth the dramatic values of the repertory in accordance with – or even far beyond – the dreams of composers and librettists. But the gadgetry I witnessed in two weeks of hectic opera going had nothing to do with composers’ or librettists’ dreams. To me they seemed more like the efforts of smart-ass producers who, having determined that the works’ original dramatic values were beyond saving for contemporary audiences, decide to create their own substitutions. The worst aspects in the staging of Los Angeles’ Don Giovanni, or San Francisco’s The Damnation of Faust and Il Trovatore, were the sense of a blatant discrepancy – call it hostility, if you will – between the looks of the productions and the drama inherent in Mozart’s and Berlioz’s and Verdi’s wonderful music.

In bursts of further wacko creativity, the directors of all three productions contributed gobbets of pseudo-psych to the program booklets. “Onstage we see the huge head of a horse, a burning pyre, a grand piano . . .,” wrote Il Trovatore‘s director Brad Dalton. “Like distorted Jungian symbols, they commingle to form a landscape of dreamy associations, as in Alice in Wonderland.” Very eloquent, but what, pray, does the glorious squareness of Verdi’s melodramatics have to do with Jungian dreamscapes? San Francisco also revived Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s La Cenerentola, not very well sung but with Ponnelle’s antic staging left intact. And across the street, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony did a lusty Flying Dutchman – Mark Delavan’s Dutchman and Jane Eaglen’s Senta were probably audible all the way to Oakland – with no scenery at all. None was needed.

Mozart’s incomparable score was handsomely delivered under Kent Nagano’s urgent, affectionate baton. The young (30!) bass-baritone Erwin Schrott, the Giovanni, was the evening’s find, both in stage presence and in a voice like idealized warm chocolate: a young Cesare Siepi, in other words. Andrea Rost sang a commanding Anna; Adina Nitescu, a properly frazzled Elvira; Rosendo Flores, a rather toneless Leporello but fun to watch. The production, from Warsaw’s Polish National Opera, took place in a box whose black walls changed to mirrors in one scene. The murdered Commendatore, whom Mozart’s music clearly delineates in a majestic D-minor, returned not as the “statua gentilissima” but as a moldering corpse.

San Francisco’s Il Trovatore was also done in a black box, and that set the tone. The soldiers sang their marching song in place; the nuns – who have the opera’s prettiest music – sang onstage, not backstage as written, as part of an infernal clutter; the grand piano merely served as something to lean upon. Marco Armiliato conducted routinely, and the singers responded in kind, except for the Azucena of Dolora Zajick, superb as always. Richard Margison was the Manrico, and Marina Mescheriakova the Leonora, both of common coinage.

The Berlioz Damnation gets a whirl this anniversary year; I suppose the fact of its not being an opera at all – merely an oratorio with no stage rubrics from composer or librettist – is the enablement for adventurous producers. San Francisco’s “adventure” was the work of two with-it Germans, longtime associates of general director Pamela Rosenberg: Jürgen Rose to design the box – white, this time – and Thomas Langhoff to move his singers around that space, both inside and out. Fedoras and trench coats were the costume of choice (as in last year’s Saint François); the Sylphs were done up in thongs and vinyl out of Frederick’s of Hollywood. (A post card to subscribers warned that this might offend delicate sensibilities; something like 80 people turned in their tickets, and several more requested seats farther up front.) David Kuebler was the wan-voiced Faust, Kristinn Sigmundsson the Mephistopheles, and Angela Denoke the Marguerite; all three made partial amends, as did Donald Runnicles’ vivid conducting. Unaccountably, the beautiful “Minuet of the Will-o-the-Wisps,” thematically related to other moments in the work, was omitted.

Meanwhile, in Long Beach, Michael Milenski’s 25-year stewardship of the opera company he founded came to a typically Milenskian end: a marvelous variorum of seven – count ’em – short pieces, some of them operas only by courtesy, and a typical David Schweizer–directed romp with – or at the expense of – Offenbach’s frothy La Périchole. The Times‘ Pasles did his predictable savaging of the Offenbach, thereby missing the seductive elegance of Andreas Mitisek’s conducting and the splendid ensemble work of the young cast. Mitisek will succeed Milenski as head of the company; he has proved his high qualities on the Long Beach podium since 1998 and did so this time as well.

The “Seven Small Operas” once again defined the spirit and the intelligence behind this remarkable operatic venture. The only real “operas” were Darius Milhaud’s three Opéras Minutes, tiny (but wonderfully action-laden) settings from Greek mythology, created in 1928 for the small-opera festival in Germany that also produced Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny-Songspiel. What a stroke of genius, reviving these immensely wise brief pieces. Isabel Milenski did the staging “curated” by her father; Mitisek conducted the small instrumental ensemble and the six-member chorus. Unforgettable.

Jeff Morrissey sang Ravel’s Don Quixote songs to middling effect with Ellen Milenski’s Dulcinea at the piano. Melissa Weaver’s “staging” of Monteverdi’s six-part madrigal Tears of a Lover at the Tomb of His Beloved enveloped the haunting music in simple classical dance movement. Robert Moran’s six-minute setting of some Gertrude Stein foofaraw was pure rapture; Nicholas Francis Chase’s interweaving of words by Ann Haroun went nowhere, but not without charm. You came away – or, at least I did – with the sense of having spent a couple of hours with the human brain at its most imaginative.