So I've Heard

It was 41 years ago when Pierre Boulez, the newly arrived dark cloud on the New York scene, first sat down with me to discuss the future of the C-major scale and similar weighty matters. He had only recently emerged as a pulverizing presence on the musical landscape; in one famous interview, he had called for the destruction of all the world’s opera houses. He had terrorized avant-garde circles with an article titled “Schoenberg Is Dead.” He had cast a menacing shadow already in Los Angeles in 1957, when his first acclaimed masterpiece, the abstruse, daunting Le Marteau Sans Maître, turned up at the Monday Evening Concerts. Robert Craft, who was trying to rehearse the work, had thrown up his hands in despair after 50 hours of struggle; Boulez, who happened to be touring the U.S. as music director of Jean-Louis Barrault’s theatrical troupe at the time, was summoned to the rescue. It became Boulez’s American debut as a concert conductor.

Over coffee in a Greenwich Village café, we spoke about total control. His musical ideal, or so he proclaimed, was “to annihilate the will of the composer in favor of a predetermining system.” With electronic means, he claimed, “one could exert one more degree of control over the eventual shape and sound of his music. Gaining this control [is] a necessary step in our development.”

That was the Boulez of 1962, a considerable distance from the Boulez of 2003 who last month led the Los Angeles Philharmonic – with endearing flexibility – through the out-of-control morass of a Bruckner symphony and a loose-jointed Haydn symphony in the orchestra’s final programs at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (and had been scheduled for even more blatant glitz, the Burleske of Richard Strauss, until that item was dropped). At Ojai a week later, during the QA after a revealing pre-Festival interview of Boulez by Ara Guzelimian, I asked him whether he would have deigned to conduct that work (or indeed any work) of Strauss back in his terrorist days, or even as recently as 10 years ago. “Of course not,” answered Pierre Boulez, and delivered an atypical Boulezian smile.

The nexus of Boulez and Ojai, inscrutable on the surface, has been one of the most stimulating phenomena on the musical map; this was the seventh recurrence. Six concerts were spread over three days; every one – even the Saturday-morning “family concert” with the Armadillo Quartet in a delightful, nicely chosen gathering of bits and pieces – became memorable in its own way. First and last there were Philharmonic programs led by Boulez. On opening night the final work was Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, music I have lived with from its beginning – December 1, 1944, in fact, when I was an usher at Boston’s Symphony Hall. Still, there were orchestral details – the muted brass in the first movement, the swirls of string tone in the third – that I have never heard so clearly set forth as on this magical night at Ojai. On Sunday there was more Bartók and more swirls – the Third Piano Concerto, with the mysterious nocturnal mutterings around Hélène Grimaud’s piano.

The marvelous Susan Graham was on hand, first for a master class that friends tell me I shouldn’t have missed, then for a ravishing revelation of exotic colors – and gown to match – in Ravel’s Shéhérazade, and finally for a solo recital nicely seconded by Brian Zeger’s piano, with a lovely range from the Brahms Gypsy Songs to the insinuating charm of French-operetta numbers to a free-thinking, devastatingly moving version of Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Marino Formenti – finally on his way to a deserved worldwide career, with a Lincoln Center debut and a Cleveland Orchestra gig on the books for next season – gave another of his unique, eclectic piano recitals, from a 16th-century keyboard piece to the Beethoven Opus 110 to the Boulez First Sonata to a couple of rather aimless brand-new works. Somehow I remember the Beethoven best, above all Formenti’s exhilarating capturing of the ecstasy of its final few pages.

On Saturday night, and almost into Sunday morning, there was the music of Boulez himself. It moved – and truly moved – along a 53-year timeline from the enchanting small Douze Notations of 1945 to solo pieces for violin and flute to the rapturous Dialogue de l’Ombre Double (for live clarinet immersed among its echoes on tape) to the ecstatic Sur Incises of 1998 that may rank as his non-vocal masterpiece.

This is what I wrote at a Green Umbrella performance in 2000: “Like many of his recent works, Boulez’s Sur Incises builds upon (Sur) the 1994 piano piece Incises. Its performing space, a stage with three harps fronting three pianos, with three gatherings of percussion across the back wall, takes your breath away even before the music starts. The music swirls and swoops; vibrant and pulsating here, dreamlike there. You think back to the obsessive percussive clatter of Boulez’s Mallarmé settings, of the Répons that fills vast spaces like an erupting volcano. This work has all those colors, but also something more: charm, ease, the urge to ingratiate that must signal a new Boulez. You had to wonder: Can anything be more beautiful than this setting?”

At Ojai there was an answer: “Yes, something can,” which the birds and frogs and soft breezes confirmed.

I heard my first Ojai Festival in 1981, and haven’t missed one since. This was the best. I may have written that of others, but never with more assurance. Ernest Fleischmann, who has guided its destiny in recent years, steps down now; if he needs a further monument than the one of him we already cherish in our estimation, let it be this extraordinary weekend, its triumphant proclamation of the mingled roles of music and the human spirit. The Cleveland Orchestra’s Tom Morris takes over as artistic director; next year’s musical star will be Kent Nagano. I don’t envy them the shoes they now must fill.

Obiter dictum: There’s no space this week for the L.A. Opera’s Don Giovanni. If you need my yes/no vote, let it be the former. It is, to cite the critic’s favorite cop-out word, interesting. Erwin Schrott, the Giovanni himself, is worth the trip from anywhere.

Photo by Betty Freeman

Bill Kraft pushes on toward 80; Mort Subotnick has just steamed past 70. Leonard Stein’s 87th looms on the horizon. In successive Wednesday-night concerts at the County Museum in May, all three geezers were the matter at hand: Bill and Mort with major compositions performed by two of our best musical adventurers, Leonard in a piano recital that became a timeline of his own decades in service to his art.

There were other connections as well, if you like playing that game. Kraft’s Settings From Pierrot Lunaire stem from a project initiated by Stein at the Schoenberg Institute back when it was still nourished by USC. Inasmuch as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire used only 21 of the nearly 50 poems in Albert Giraud’s collection of spook-haunted, expressionistic poems, the Institute came up with the idea of commissioning composers to deal with the poems that Schoenberg hadn’t got to. The scoring was to be the same as Schoenberg’s – singer/speaker, piano, a couple of strings and winds, with percussion as the single new addition. The results were performed in a series of programs in the mid-1980s. Kraft then went on to create his own extended work: four of the Pierrot poems set to music plus instrumental interludes, the whole thing lasting about 25 minutes. His Settings have been recorded, on Albany. Haunting, subtle, exquisite yet intense, they form one of Kraft’s strongest works; I listen to them often. The cherishable Daisietta Kim, who doesn’t perform nearly often enough anymore, sang them magically; the ensemble we know as XTET, energized by the moonbeams from Dorothy Stone’s flute, matched her all the way.

The next week the California EAR Unit, with Dorothy Stone this time at the piano, celebrated Subotnick with five works old and new, ending – no, make that “culminating” – with the 1985 The Key to Songs, which occupies the same place in Subotnick’s legacy as the Settings do in Kraft’s: an elegant, shapely work of pure imagination, stretching the credulity and rewarding the attention. There are interesting if tenuous connections between the two works. Subotnick, too, draws his inspiration from the indefinable fantasies of that unfathomable surrealist, the painter/poet Max Ernst, whose shadow falls over a number of Subotnick’s works. The inspiration here is an Ernst novel that I don’t pretend to understand, except in the moments in Subotnick’s score when, out of nowhere, quotations from a couple of Schubert songs poke into the texture. Subotnick wrote the piece for the EAR Unit as it existed at CalArts in 1985; it was recorded on New Albion and is still available.

What connects these two works above all is the fact that their musical existence draws upon other music. Luciano Berio died last week, and one of the most extraordinary aspects of his life in music was the range of his ability to nourish his own music from the musical world around him. In everything I know about Berio’s music, I am charmed by where Berio has located himself in these works. In every one of his Sequenze for solo instruments – including the one for cello that Rohan de Saram played here recently, and emphatically in the one Berio wrote for the solo voice of his beloved Cathy Berberian – it is the voice of Berio in this music, exploring, proclaiming, filling empty spaces with the emanations from his awful cigars.

The famous movement of his Sinfonia has Berio somewhere in the middle, attempting to listen to a favorite bit of Mahler while the whole world – perhaps at open windows in some Roman apartment complex – tries to get in his way. He spoke about his A-Ronne, the piece for actors, as a kind of “documentary” on the Edoardo Sanguineti poem they were trying to perform. His Rendering, a late work, seems to re-enact his own delight in discovering a manuscript of Schubert sketches and his burning need to share it with us. His wonderful opera Un Re in Ascolto, which begs for local performance, is also a “documentary,” an exploration of the several simultaneous human tragedies in Shakespeare’s King Lear. His music – the great works that the world now knows, and even the tiny wisp of a piano piece, Interlinea, that Leonard Stein played at his recital last week – has this mysterious power to take us close to itself, but also close to what it means to be in love with all music. (About Pierre Boulez’s Third Sonata, with which Leonard Stein grappled manfully, I wish I could say the same, but cannot – as yet.) With Berio the man no longer among us, it becomes even more important to hold on to that power to love that his own art radiates.

Last week was not a good time for jabberwocky. At Ojai, Karen Painter – musicologist, woman of mystery, mother-to-be – began the latest festival with one of her famously convoluted speeches, this one on matters of modernism and postmodernism consistent with the presence of Pierre Boulez as this year’s musical eminence. Distracted to some degree by Dr. Painter’s stage presence – including a choreography with a rebellious sweater and a manner of delivery in the soprano register that would make KPCC’s Kitty Felde a basso profundo by contrast – I was able to glean that modernism throughout history has been followed by postmodernism, and that is what is happening today, but not as much. More on Ojai next week.

At LACMA the “Conversation” with Boulez and Frank Gehry sold out at the box office in 12 minutes. That was as it should be: Two great shaping forces in the arts, in particular prominence due to current local events, should have crucial messages for an expectant arts-consuming audience. Some of this actually happened; some didn’t. The evening’s interlocutor, one Paul Holdengräber – who apparently is employed by LACMA to keep such events on track (buffered by a vaguely exotic “artistic” accent) – actually did everything in his power to derail the conversation. Rather than following the line of thought from his participants, or even doing them the courtesy of listening to them instead of playing the eye game with notables in the audience, he continually tried to break into the conversation with his own card file of irrelevant changes of subject. Only when Frank Gehry, bless ‘im!, finally ordered Holdengräber to shut up (in just those words) did the evening take on something worth the price of those tickets.

Never underestimate, therefore, the self-importance of the unimportant.

Backstage at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall – one of the world’s less-inviting concert venues – the usual day-before-the-concert chaos reigns on a Monday night in late April. The critics and the connoisseurs have come to town for the premiere of the Violin Concerto by the young Korean composer Unsuk Chin, who is currently, as they say, “hot”; now it is not going to happen. As conductor Kent Nagano will explain to a sellout crowd at tomorrow’s Berkeley Symphony Orchestra concert with his well-known soft-spoken humor, only one violinist on the planet is capable of confronting Ms. Chin’s fiendish technical demands, and that violinist, Tibor Kovac, had called in over the weekend to report the onslaught of tendinitis. Finding a proper substitute for a major new work is no easy matter – as the Los Angeles Philharmonic has also discovered several times this past season. Nagano, with a sizable assist from UC Berkeley’s electronic guru David Wessel, has concocted a reasonable substitute, a tape-only composition by Ms. Chin that will fill Zellerbach’s vast space with four-channel ersatz percussion.

The crisis properly dispatched, Nagano has a few – but only a few – minutes to chat. He is just in town from concerts with his European anchor, Berlin’s Deutsches-Symphonie, which he had brought to Los Angeles last season for the memorable performance of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. After the Berkeley concert he will drop in on the Los Angeles Opera to prepare for the performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni that opens this weekend and runs through June 20. By then it will be time to get to work on Hector Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, which Nagano will conduct at the L.A. Opera’s season opener next September. Oh, and by the way, during his stay in Los Angeles this month he will be anointed the company’s music director, the first possessor of that important title. Strong hands on the podium were not always the top priority of the company’s founder, Peter Hemmings; they have become more so under Plácido Domingo’s hegemony – even though Domingo’s own occasional podium stints have not exactly lit lights.

Berlin, Los Angeles, London, Lyons, Paris: The 51-year-old Nagano certainly moves among the major gigs, yet he has also been conductor of the Berkeley Symphony for 25 years and has no plans to stop. The BSO, as it is lovingly referred to by the natives, was founded in 1969 (as the “Berkeley Promenade Orchestra”) by a hopeful maestro, Brit-trained, named Thomas Rarick; the L.A. Times‘ Mark Swed was one of the first conductors. The “Prom”’s stock-in-trade was an easygoing performing style in street clothes and a passion for overreaching. (In a performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, the percussionist made up for the absence of the prescribed sleigh bells by banging his keys against a music stand.) Nagano, fresh from music studies at UC Santa Cruz, came on as conductor in 1978. He put the players in matching socks, and adopted the more formal name and a more serious programming. The first concerts were in the 750-seat First Congregational Church; in 1989 the orchestra moved to the 2,015-seat Zellerbach. (Tom Rarick, by the way, went on to become lieutenant governor of the state of Indiana.)

Over takeout and iced tea in his dressing room, Nagano tries to define the ties that bind him to underdog Berkeley as well as top-dog Berlin and Los Angeles. “Actually, I regard working here as a privilege, and that’s because the players also feel that way. A good percent of the players have been here since I came, and that kind of loyalty comes to mean a lot. We have an interesting age gap in the orchestra: some who’ve retired from the San Francisco Symphony and other orchestras, plus a lot of students. It’s fascinating to watch the way the one age group has such an influence on the other. There’s a human value here, and I don’t sense it anywhere near as clearly in my other orchestras.

“Beyond that, there is the chance to explore, to experiment, that I don’t find in other orchestras. Here is Berkeley; up in those hills there are scientists, Pulitzer winners, Nobel winners, radical thinkers. This affects the way I plan the season for the BSO. We give maybe six concerts a year. We do a certain portion of the standard repertory – tomorrow night we play two contemporary works plus two by Mozart. But I have the chance here to look for composers who may be making a stir somewhere. Take Unsuk Chin, for example. She has had a lot of performances in Europe, and I’m sorry you won’t hear her concerto tomorrow. We got eight curtain calls when we did it in Berlin, and we’ll bring it back here in a year or two. She was once composer in residence with my Berlin orchestra.”

In a city that supports nearly a dozen full-time orchestras while fighting off the demons of poverty, Nagano has found a distinctive niche for his Deutsches-Symphonie. The orchestra’s history goes back to prewar Berlin, when it played under Wilhelm Furtwängler at the Berlin State Opera. After WWII it re-formed with American support as the Orchestra of RIAS (Radio in the American Sector), whose conductors included Ferenc Fricsay and Lorin Maazel. It kept the “radio” identity until recently; Nagano has been its conductor since 2000.

“In a sense,” Nagano recalls, “the orchestra has carried on the Furtwängler mission. You think of him as a conductor of Beethoven and Brahms, but he also had a keen appetite for the new music of his time. Even so, we’ve had to bring that appetite up to date. Obviously, Schoenberg’s music would have been proscribed in earlier days, and so I organized the celebration in 2001 and ’02 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his death. Moses und Aron became part of that celebration; we brought it to Berlin and Vienna. Plácido wanted us to come to Los Angeles with a premiere, but giving Moses und Aron for the first time here was premiere enough.”

Nagano’s arrival on the operatic scene came about in a topsy-turvy manner – not the usual apprenticeship with Mozart and Rossini but through Olivier Messiaen and his daunting Saint François d’ Assise. In 1981 Nagano had invited Messiaen to sit in on a festival of his music in Berkeley, and the venerable maître returned the favor by inviting him to Paris to assist Seiji Ozawa in the premiere of the opera. It was Nagano who, years later, made the first complete recording of Messiaen’s opera; by then he had also recorded a number of performances with France’s Opéra de Lyon; his delicious production of Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges copped all kinds of prizes, for the performance itself and for the video.

“I could never have opera as my exclusive love,” he says. Still, the list of works he has triumphed in adds up to a declaration of hope for the future of that peculiar medium: Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de Loin in its Salzburg premiere, John Adams’ El Niño in Paris, Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer in Brussels and Nixon in China in Los Angeles.

Where, with all that traveling, does Kent Nagano feel at home?

“In California,” he says without hesitation. “My home is in San Francisco, which I love because of the weather . . . the fog. I grew up in Morro Bay, where my parents – second-generation Japanese – had a commercial farm, 300 acres of artichokes, sugar beets, strawberries. There was a refugee from Munich, Vaclav Korischelli, who persuaded the Morro Bay School District to let him teach a music class – 7:30 in the morning and again after school in the afternoon. And so, a dozen of us kids – the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Jerry Folsom was one of us – got this real Hochschule music training from early on.

“The Japanese identity is a little harder to hold on to, after three generations here in California, with the open, uncrowded beauty of the central coast around Morro Bay in my personal background. I’ve traveled to Japan with my orchestras, of course, but I’m not aware of any ‘returning native son’ treatment in the big cities. Where I have felt that is in my ancestral home in a small village near Kumamoto, on Kyushu Island. After my grandfather emigrated to California he kept sending money back to help rebuild that city. When I first visited there, seven or eight years ago, I did get the honored-son treatment.

“I do live, of course, with many identities. But if you want to know who I am, as The Mikado‘s song goes, ‘I am, above all, Californian.’”

Just at the moment when our ears were most in need of refreshment and a thorough cleaning out, along came MicroFest to accomplish exactly that. Month after month the gnrr had piled up in our auricular canals: all those turgidities in the Mozart piano concertos, the scary modulations that Bach drags in to frighten small children, the huff ‘n’ puff in those interminable Beethoven adagios – the “dull industrial gray of a global monoculture in twelve-tone equal temperament” as Lou Harrison so aptly phrased it. Yes, sir, a couple of weeks of just intonation after all that diatonic torture may have been just what the doctor ordered. (Or maybe not.)

Most major cities hold MicroFests nowadays: gatherings of musicians dedicated to preserving the various ways in which music can flourish outside the imprisoning system of 12 equally distant tones to the octave. The system is best visualized by the keys of the piano, organ and harpsichord, or the keying mechanisms of winds, which preserve the compromises – the tuning generally known as “equal temperament” – concocted by theorists around the time of Bach and Handel to sidestep the purity of the Pythagorean overtones, enable composers to work in all 24 possible major and minor keys, and modulate freely from one to another. Most American and European music composed since, say, 1720 uses equal temperament. Before these compromises, in the glory days known to true microtonal believers as “just intonation,” musical intervals and harmonies followed simple physical ratios: 2:1 for the octave, 3:2 for the perfect fifth. But this physical adherence also led to all kinds of clashes; you couldn’t, for example, modulate from G-sharp to A-flat, even though on the modern keyboard these are the same note. (I oversimplify shamelessly, mostly so that I, too, can understand what I’m trying to say.)

“Microtonal,” therefore, is the catchall term for music outside equal temperament. To ears coddled in Schubert and Brahms, music in just intonation sounds – well, just weird. So does Indian music, or Indonesian gamelan, although the unfamiliar harmonies are mitigated by the exoticism of the instruments themselves. The best-known escapees from the imprisonment of equal temperament, Lou Harrison and Terry Riley – both generously represented on the MicroFest programs over the past two weeks – composed major works in just intonation, and also made enthusiastic use of the profusion of Asian scales. Another renegade, Harry Partch, postulated a scale of no fewer than 43 tones, and built his own instruments to make them possible. His music, too, was on the MicroFest roster.

I got to three of this year’s five concerts. At Pasadena’s First Presbyterian Church, the Donald Brinegar Singers, an excellent small chorus, sang music by Lou Harrison – including the setting of the Mark Twain text on American imperialism that I quoted with wonderment last week. Supporting them in some works was the gamelan orchestra based at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont; in one other memorable work, Bill Alves’ Luminescence, voices, gamelan and computer-generated tones joined in a haunting, nocturnal reverie: unearthly, far beyond the reaches of harmonic or tuning systems. At Claremont’s Lyman Hall there was further amazement, most of all in a computer reworking by Alves of a musical design by Harrison – Simfony in Free Style – that was purposely composed beyond the reach of human performers: an intricate working out of a contrapuntal problem that begins as a knotty tangle of ideas and ends in pure, ethereal beauty six or so minutes later. (The work, in another computerized version, is included on the disc that comes with the biography Lou Harrison, Composing a World, published by Oxford in 1998.)

Terry Riley came down from his woodland den and had a program to himself: two big keyboard pieces, and an hourlong documentary film by Cecilia Miniucchi sporting minimalism’s all-star cast. The plan had included the West Coast premiere of Riley’s A Dream, for solo piano in just intonation, followed by the world premiere of his Baghdad Highway for electronic keyboard and voice; unfortunately, Pierce College – where the concert took place before an impressively large crowd – couldn’t come up with a piano tunable to just intonation, so the same Korg Triton Studio 88 was pressed into service for both works. That was a loss; being in Terry Riley’s company as he performs on a just-tuned real piano is one of those experiences you don’t forget.

Baghdad Highway, however, was performed as composed: Riley intoning a haunting string of lamenting texts in a twisted skein of languages – including some bitter English reflections on humanity in travail. (Interesting that two of MicroFest’s leading lights expressed themselves during the festival in very ancient music wound around very contemporary tragedy.) The very young Riley landed in our midst some 40 years ago with music single-mindedly tied to Western diatonic harmony. In C was about nothing but C major; even if you perform it today with sitar, gamelan or Eskimo nose flute, its C-majorness remains steadfast. From this Terry Riley has come a long distance, and we can feel privileged in having been along on the route.

Cecilia Miniucchi’s film captures some of this privilege. Considering the well-known outspokenness of some of the luminaries she has lured before her camera – imagine Philip Glass and Steve Reich arriving at points of agreement! – she has produced something of a document over and beyond the actual content of her excellent film. I’m only surprised that the film didn’t catch fire by itself in the can.

If you were at Ojai last summer, you’re probably still aglow from Marino Formenti’s piano concerts: the “marathon” earlier in the week and the two astonishing recitals later on. “Why hasn’t he recorded?” was a question frequently asked. He’ll be back next week, but now the question has an answer. It comes on two discs from Germany’s Col-Legno label. One is a recital of music by Germany’s quizzical, enigmatic, unfathomable Helmut Lachenmann, including the Serynade that Formenti had performed at Eclectic Orange earlier last season; this will take work. The other disc, more immediately accessible, is titled nothing is real, and has strawberries in the cover design and a piece by Alvin Lucier named after the Beatles number in question. Better yet, it includes Georg Friederich Haas’ Hommage à Ligeti for Two Pianos With a Quarter-Tone Difference, which Formenti played – alone! – at Ojai. Talk about your ancient intonations and your exotic Baghdad scales! These are discs to cherish. Ojai’s people tell me that, for the moment anyhow, they have dibs for the U.S. market on these Formenti discs and will have a supply on sale during next week’s festival. Otherwise, you’re on your own: www.collegno.de.

In March 1984 I lived through a week forever memorable. In Rome I sat in on rehearsals for Act 5 of Robert Wilson’s the CIVIL warS to Philip Glass’ music, at the time when there were plans for all five acts to head for Los Angeles’ Olympic Arts Festival. Then Stuttgart beckoned, where the opera Akhnaten, also by Glass, was having its world premiere in Achim Freyer’s magical production. In Cologne I saw Act 4 of Wilson’s warS, and attended the world premiere of Steve Reich’s The Desert Music. At the end of the week the news came that Los Angeles had scrubbed the CIVIL warS – through a failure of nerve, funding or both. Akhnaten – not the last of Glass’ stage works but the last of the handful with real distinction – gets a performance now and then. The Desert Music abides, although last month’s performance by the Master Chorale under Grant Gershon was, if memory serves, only the second in local history. It deserves closer attention.

It’s a milestone work, the last and largest of Reich’s music for concert stage, in which the buildup through extended repetition is wonderfully illuminated by changes in sonority – as he did with the women’s voices that punctuate the phrase structure in the other large masterwork, Music for 18 Musicians. Desert Music is something else again, a skillful – and, I think, successful – blend of repetitive buildup and a structural plan that is actually symphonic: thematic returns, and even an interweave of text and musical technique. “It is a principle of music to repeat the theme: repeat and repeat again, as the pace mounts”; those are William Carlos Williams’ words, and Reich’s music follows them brilliantly. Chug-chug-chug goes the music with mounting insistence, and the goose bumps rise. The performance under Gershon used a new version, building out the modest orchestra with a contingent of brass. I would have liked to hear the work without Reich’s stipulation that everything be miked, but perhaps that’s a prospect for the new hall if and when.

The concert began with a sampling of early Americana, contrapuntal hymns and anthems from the 18th and early 19th centuries by William Billings for the most part. The news here is not that the infant nation had bred a generation of geniuses that early in its history, but that its citizen-composers could turn out good, serious musical pieces that knew how to obey the rules. The geniuses came later. The Master Chorale’s programming serendipity remains praiseworthy; Grant Gershon has the chops for the job, and the charm as well.

At the Skirball Center (and at other locales under Skirball sponsorship), there was a festival tracing Jewish influences in music – serious and not, present and past. By some distance the most interesting was a revival of Paul Wegener’s 1920 silent film Der Golem, the only one of several treatments of the 15th-century Jewish legend that has survived more or less intact. Beyond the film itself, the golem figure (and its close relative, Dr. Frankenstein’s creature) forms a fascinating study: the downtrodden society – the ghettos of medieval Europe, the misunderstood scientist – creating its redeeming superhero out of common clay.

As the highlight of Skirball’s Beyond Bim-Bam festival, The Golem arrived decked out with a new score by Israel’s Betty Olivero, performed by the clarinetist Marty Krystall with the Armadillo Quartet conducted by Germany’s silent-film authority Günter A. Buchwald. The whole affair was a model of imaginative restoration: a score with exactly the right mix of ghetto folk tune and the deeply colored sadness of a grieving populace. The film itself is a marvel; the shadows of Caligari are everywhere apparent. The acting, with Wegener himself as the lumbering, menacing, messianic monster, is remarkably communicative. I expected a primitive ur-cinematic experience; I beheld instead a creation of genuine power.

Lumbering, menacing, monster: Something else on the musical horizon deserves description in those terms. That would be the Third Symphony of Gustav Mahler, out of which Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the screaming bejesus at last week’s Philharmonic concerts, Salonen’s final appearances in that house of so-so repute. History ordained the performance. The Third was Salonen’s big doorstep to fame and glory, when he stepped in for the ailing Michael Tilson Thomas at a concert in London in the fortuitously managed presence of Ernest Fleischmann. He led it here to inaugurate his career as the Philharmonic’s music director – and now this. The Mahler Third, you might say, is Salonen’s signature tune, his albatross.

Arguably, it was created to be just that. Don’t get me wrong; there is a special greatness in the piece. It comes at you within minutes, as one wild, gesturesome tune after another rises out of the gloom of trombone agony, beats its wings against the chandeliers and falls back into its own spoor. It comes at you again as the jingling ditties and the brave, noble postman’s horn tell of the beauty of the sunrise. And then there is the end, as a D-major apocalypse lights the lamps farther than the human eye can perceive. To conduct the Mahler Third well – as Salonen did to deserved, thunderous acclaim – is to know how to unleash those forces, and then stand out of their way. Conducting Beethoven, or Shostakovich, demands other kinds of talent. Salonen has those too.

I have to share with you something in the program for a concert I attended last week. Read the quotation first:

We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them, destroyed their fields, burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property . . . and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by these Providences of God – and the phrase is the government’s, not mine – we are a World Power.

The writer was Mark Twain, from his many writings satirizing the self-righteous imperialism of the Philippine War. It was set to music – voices and gamelan – by Lou Harrison, and performed by the Donald Brinegar Singers and the Harvey Mudd College American Gamelan at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church as part of the Southern California MicroFest now going on at several locales. I’ll write more about these concerts next week, but the Mark Twain quotation struck me as too good to delay.

Illustration courtesy the Bettmann Archive, New York

The Philharmonic’s celebration of Dmitri Shostakovich – all 15 symphonies performed over five years, with all 15 string quartets as a welcome supplement – is now two years along. The observance may have lacked the snazzy added attractions of the orchestra’s previous Stravinsky and Schoenberg celebrations, but the L.A. Opera fell into the fortunate accident of being saddled with Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and that did the cause no harm. As pre-concert events we have had the quartets, one at a time, number by number. The numerical matchups didn’t quite work; none of the quartets Nos. 4, 5 or 6 – charming but lightweight works – cast any particular light on the serious matters within the like-numbered symphonies. On the other hand, the performance of the Fourth Symphony – knottiest and least-known of the 15 – came with program notes and a pre-concert talk by Laurel Fay, whose Shostakovich, A Life (Oxford, 2000) has been a splendid antidote to a lot of the gobbledygook that has clouded our understanding of the composer over the years. Despite his often-aired distaste for the Fifth Symphony, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s performance of the work last weekend did not spell the end of the world.

Salonen had conducted No. 6, with its imponderable slow opening movement and the inexplicable ensuing rooty-tooty, early in the season; the other two came consecutively these past two weeks. Hearing the Fourth and Fifth in close order cast some light on possible reasons for the dim view a few people entertain toward the Fifth. Yes, there are good things in the work. The scherzo is short, snappy and full of giggles. The slow movement unfolds with irresistible momentum, and the climax – which Shostakovich achieves this once without the superfluous pandemonium of big brass and drums – can lift you (meaning me) out of your seat. But Salonen’s performance, nicely controlled though it was, made me sadly aware of the bare-bones architecture of the first movement and the empty vulgarity of the finale. Every tune that comes on slow and quiet later turns up fast and loud; the affectation of seriousness in the slowdown midway though the finale is purely dull. (Artur Rodzinski’s old 78-rpm recording, the first version I owned, removed a long and sad swatch from that last movement, a considerable improvement. I also cherish a tape of a Philharmonic performance led by Kurt Sanderling from the 1980s, which offered the finale uncut but solved its problems, through its judicious choice of tempos, better than any I’ve heard.)

The Fourth, well-paced and -shaded under Salonen, came on as a revelation. Its story is well-known: The 28-year-old Shostakovich, riding high after the initial success of Lady Macbeth, was then devastated when Stalin himself saw and detested the opera. The Fourth Symphony, on the brink of its much-anticipated premiere, was ordered into nonexistence by Soviet authorities. Only a sequence of sheer luck saved the composer from the firing squad or Siberia. The Fifth Symphony was composed a year later as a kind of apologia; you could argue, in fact, that its simplistic structures were meant as a dumbing down to the level of Soviet music critics of the time. Twenty-five years would pass before the Fourth Symphony got its first hearing – in the USSR or in the outside world. It was worth the wait. Even Shostakovich, hearing its first concert performance, pronounced it his best work; he may have been right.

This is big, tough music, lasting nearly an hour. Its mood changes are violent and subject to frequent tantrums. The orchestra is huge: 20 winds, 17 brass, kitchenware up the bazooty. Laurel Fay writes about its “lavish profusion of ideas.” Amazement is in order as the music executes its wide swings from a funeral march here to a waltz medley there, to a mighty blast from brass and timpani. The layout is, let’s say, weird: two movements, lasting nearly half an hour each, framing a short and mean-tempered scherzo. “Manic, turbulent, the human fate of the bruised individual,” writes UC Berkeley’s Richard Taruskin of the work; he is haunted by the work’s “incertitude, its irreducible multivalence,” and so am I. This is music of overpowering rhetoric, the more so in those violent shifts. The architecture here is anything but bare-bones; a panoramic panoply staggers the receptors. At the end the music recedes into a deep, dark distance; after a prolonged C-minor chord sustained in the strings, the celesta sounds its distant bell-like tones as an angelic echo. (The first movement of the Fifth Symphony also ends that way, but with lesser impact.) Mahler comes to mind: the final recession into sunlight in the Third Symphony, into darkness in the Ninth. The Shostakovich Fourth needs a proper recording; the available Previn and Ormandy versions will not do. Salonen’s performance unlocked most of the magic, and it needs to be preserved.

Extraordinary concerto performances preceded each of the symphonies: Olli Mustonen with the Prokofiev Third Piano, Pieter Wispelwey with the miraculous Dvorák for cello. The Mustonen enigma persists; his affectations at the keyboard render him unwatchable. Yet you could argue that Prokofiev’s flash and dash are scored for all of Mustonen’s arm waving and the awesome accuracy of his dive-bombing onto exactly the right key every time. The watching this time, therefore, was almost as much fun as the hearing.

Wispelwey, Netherlands-born, was enlisted to replace the scheduled but ailing Truls Mørk; New York critics in the past couple of weeks had been raving over Wispelwey’s solo performances there, and well they might. The Dvorák is every cellist’s bread and butter, and every listener’s favorite weep-along, but its wonders do not pale. Every collection worth its shelf space must have its versions by Casals, du Pré, Rostropovich (maybe half a dozen), Yo-Yo . . . And yet you wait for the message in that opening down-bow on the B natural to christen the next performance; it is one of music’s greatest single notes. It was greatly played this time. So were the ensuing notes, every one.

H.K. (as in Heinz Karl) Gruber paid us a welcome return visit last week, while memories of last year’s trumpet concerto – appropriately titled Aerial — continue their happy throb. At the season’s final Green Umbrella, he unfurled his Zeitfluren (“Timescapes”), a new piece co-commissioned by the Philharmonic’s New Music Group, along with music by two Viennese compatriots that made his own piece sound even better.

For all its musical glory – which embraces the beloved “Silent Night” by H.K.’s distant ancestor Franz – Vienna has always ranked behind other European centers as a supporter of hardcore new musical impulses. In his preconcert talk Gruber spoke of the Philharmonic’s New Music Group in tones of genuine envy – not only for its high performance qualities but also for its role as a catalyst among its colleagues to spark the full orchestra’s supportive attitude toward new music. Matters in Vienna, he said, were improving, but slowly. The city does now boast one or two decently qualified new-music ensembles, although they usually perform to half-empty halls. (I am constantly delighted at the turnout for the Green Umbrella concerts here, and at the interesting mix of listeners, some wet behind the ears and others long in the tooth.)

If the music chosen and conducted by Gruber for this concert sends any message, however, it is that caution remains the abiding Viennese watchword. First there was the Verwandlungsmusik (“Transformation Music”) by Kurt Schwertsik, a veritable toy box of bright-colored shards: tiny fanfares, a “little overture,” an even smaller “triumph march,” a “parade,” a “little finale,” and an “after-dance” with some attractive rhythmic craziness – all bearing the message of painless, germ-free modernity. Friedrich Cerha, best known for his completion of Alban Berg’s not-quite-finished Lulu, sent along his Eight Movements After Hölderlin Fragments, a string sextet permeated with the dense passions of Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night of 104 years ago and pretty much cut from the same harmonic fabric.

There was no problem, therefore, in recognizing Gruber’s own work as by far the evening’s strongest. Its major strength is its marvelous scoring – for an ensemble of 18 winds, brass, strings, piano and percussion – and the clarity as inner voices seem suspended in space. Wit and wisdom form an impeccable counterpoint; ordinary as some of its melodic inspiration may be at times, there is always a twist, a turn toward the unexpected. A first movement is overcast with a dark, luminous blanket of dust and shadows; a second movement emerges into a blinding light pierced with distant echoes of Vienna’s dance-band past. Overall, this is sterner stuff than Gruber’s most famous work, the hilariously endearing Frankenstein!! (exclamation points ‘n’ all), but the twinkle is there all the same.

In 1948 the Louisville Orchestra, like so many other not-quite-full-time ensembles, was in financial trouble. Unlike many other communities with hopes for artistic eminence, Louisville had a mayor who was also chairman of the orchestra board, and Charlie Farnsley determined that something needed to be done. And while the two major steps he proposed might strike you as contradictory, they worked. First, he reduced the size of the orchestra from 70 to 50. Second, he created a commissioning project: The orchestra would pay for, perform and record five new works every year. 1948 was also the year of the LP, and these new works were to be recorded on this newfangled technology that had already begun to catch on. The composers chosen were world-famous; the first batch included Paul Hindemith, William Schuman, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson and Darius Milhaud.

The commissioning program, with funding along the way from the Rockefeller Foundation, eventually wound down; by 1959 the Louisville Orchestra had premiered and recorded 116 works by 101 composers. Further money came along: a two-year grant from BMI, a wad from the Ford Foundation. Robert Whitney, who conducted the orchestra at the start of the program, was later replaced; among his successors was Jorge Mester, currently of the Pasadena Symphony. By 1995 the total had swelled to 158 LPs and 10 CDs, more than 400 works by 250 composers.

Now there is “First Edition Music,” run by the Santa Fe Music Group, with plans to reissue the entire Louisville caboodle on CD. Seven discs are at hand; eight more are planned for this year. While major producers prune their catalogs down to Beethoven for Babes and the like, here is a project that restores, in one grandiose gesture, a huge block of creative endeavor in the recent history of serious music. The parameters set by Farnley and his group were broad and intelligent – not just American composers, but good composers with a world-view: Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, Luigi Dallapiccola, Andrej Panufnik.

Not every item is of vital importance, of course. Working my way through the arm-waving, empty oratory of Roy Harris’ Violin Concerto or his Fifth Symphony, I can easily understand why his music is currently out of fashion. A whole disc of John Corigliano, including the Piano Concerto of which better performances are available, ends up as 67 minutes 44 seconds of the same thing endlessly repeated. The picture-postcard exoticism of Alan Hovhaness loses its only reason for existence under Robert Whitney’s uneventful baton, with the sound in remastered mono. It needs an Ormandy and a Philadelphia sound. A whole disc of Henry Cowell’s orchestral music is full of the congenial blandness of his last years, sidestepping the truly enterprising works of earlier times.

But then, among this first set of reissues, there is a disc of George Crumb’s glorious, insolent orchestral inventions, including the 1968 Pulitzer-blessed Echoes of Time and the River. Jorge Mester is the conductor, and it’s time he performed it here in Pasadena. What grand deviltry is here! What an amazing collage of textures, as percussionists troop across the stage, string players croak out nonsense syllables, and the xylophone taps out messages in Morse code. It isn’t that nobody writes this kind of music anymore; it’s just that nobody gets to hear it. In Louisville, once upon a time, they knew what to do.

Gerald Levinson’s Five Fires wasted the Philharmonic’s time (and mine) two weeks ago with the same bag of aimless sound effects that afflicted his Second Symphony here eight years ago – shorter this time but no less distasteful. Both works, in fact, were apparently cut from the same cloth – or, to drag in a more useful metaphor, culled from the same box of post cards collected by the composer during a sojourn in Bali. Gongs resound, chimes and cymbals whir and twitter, the roar of brass and timpani keeps everything earthbound. It’s late in the day, I should think, to sell chunks of fabricated exotica – nine minutes’ worth of this new work, 37 minutes of the Second Symphony, music so truly awful that I remember every note – merely by daubing travelogue colors onto an impoverished musical design. Lou Harrison knew better how to deal with such irresistible material.

The Levinson piece temporarily shook my confidence in the present and future of our music; two nights later, the group known as eighth blackbird (lower case, they insist) flew into town to restore it. Six Oberlin graduates, currently resident at two fortunate Chicago universities, play new music, mostly brand-new stuff that willing composers old and young have created for this most appealing group. Their basic ensemble is that of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire: violin/viola, cello, piano, flute and clarinet, plus percussion. It’s a scoring that lends itself to wide possibilities. (On May 14, at LACMA, the fine local ensemble XTET performs an extended suite of Bill Kraft’s pieces for a similar “Pierrot ensemble,” and you should be there.)

For its concert at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall, the blackbirds put together “Di/Verge,” a set of commissioned works by four members of New York’s Minimum Security Composers Collective, ballsy and smart composers in their early 30s (as are the ‘birds). Each composer – Dennis DeSantis, Roshanne Etezady, Adam Silverman and Ken Ueno – had come up with a four-movement suite; the 16 movements were then shuffled and performed as two continuous sets of eight. The players had memorized their music, and this gave them the chance to wander around the stage in an easygoing choreography. The music, too, could be counted as easygoing: small, angular conceits, sometimes breaking down into a flowing melodic line, mostly acrobatic – some jagged Hindemith here, a harmony that Ravel might recognize. It all came together as an evening of pure pleasure – modest, immensely likable, and, in its own way, original and enterprising.

Concord and discord: Charles Ives’ Second Piano Sonata is a work apart. Purely on the strength of its size and scope, it demands to be taken seriously; those who would hack their tortuous way through its thorny convolutions stand as a band of heroes. To performer and hearer alike, the “Concord” Sonata is as daunting a task as the repertory offers. The musical challenges are murderous; blend them – as Ives demanded – with invocations of the great minds of Concord, and the task is insurmountable. At Zipper Hall last week, Susan Svrcek took on the beast as the culminating work in her Piano Spheres recital, and scored an impressive victory.

Is it worth the struggle? I’ve changed my mind on the matter more than once. The opening pins you to your seat; it’s a veritable tsunami of unbridled rhetoric – as much Beethovenian as Emersonian, and with an intrusive, ubiquitous quote from the Fifth Symphony – but where does it go? Soon after, the suspicion sets in that all these notes are busily engaged in chasing all those notes, that the composer has stumbled into a vast musical design, a maze, perhaps, without a clue as to how to get out. The accounts from reliable sources (Elliott Carter, for one) of Ives juicing up his score by adding “modern” dissonances long after completing the work add to my unrest. The Beethoven references are of no help; you can go da-da-da-DAH all night and the lamps remain unlit. Emerson, that eloquent logician, is of even less help; nobody has ever accused the “Concord” Sonata of logical design. You begin to suspect that Ives has brought his first movement to an end simply because he has run out of paper.

It gets better. Hawthorne and the Alcotts, serene and jovial presences, whisper intimations of Schubert in their respective movements, and the tensions subside. Thoreau is not quite at peace, with us or with himself, but at the end he wanders off and plays his beloved flute – as did Dorothy Stone, in Zipper’s balcony. The music doesn’t really end, as Emerson or Beethoven or Schubert might define “ending,” but – some 50 minutes after the hurly-burly of that beginning – at least it stops.

Morton Subotnick turned 70 last week, and CalArts gave him a small musical celebration. (The California EAR Unit does better by him at LACMA next month.) Subotnick came to CalArts in 1969, early enough in that school’s history that he ranks as a founding father. When you think of CalArts music, you think of Subotnick first. In New York in the 1960s, he had laid down his parameters for tape music, working with Donald Buchla’s synthesizer, the first gadget that brought musical electronics down to desktop size. In his time at CalArts, the computer had also arrived at desktop size, and it was Mort Subotnick who led the generations of student experimenters to postulate the interaction between electronically produced music and the means to put that music through computerized hoops of all shapes and sizes.

He hasn’t stopped. He still comes to CalArts (along with other destinations), and he is still obsessed with involving young musical experimenters – sometimes very young – in music making. I play with some of his interactive “making music” programs aimed at restoring the notion of children as active participants in the creative process; I learn a lot from them.

At the CalArts concert last week there were some of his full-of-beans early works for instruments and computer – Axolotl for solo cello and After the Butterfly for solo trumpet and instrumental octet. Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick was again the solo cellist, as she had been in 1981. Subotnick sat at a Mac laptop, no larger than this page, and pressed a button or two to release the feverish, ongoing energy of the tape piece Until Spring. The composer Nicholas Chase produced a kind of music by playing some of the old Nonesuch and Sony LPs of Subotnick’s music from way back when, and monkeying around with the turntables to create a distorted collage of some of the great moments. I’m not sure I understand this new turntable art form; if I ever do, it will probably be under Mort’s guidance. That’s the way it has always been.

Three unchallenged masterworks, each over 250 years old, serve civilization as the musical translation of the essence of humanness. On successive evenings over one weekend early this month, all three – the St. John and St. Matthew Passions of J.S. Bach, the Messiah of George Frideric Handel – filled and consecrated the air at UCLA’s Royce Hall. When have we earthlings proved worthy of such bounty?

If any music can qualify as “essential,” these works surely do. They tell basically the same story. Handel surveys a historical panorama – the coming of Jesus, the betrayal and crucifixion, the promise of redemption. Bach expands upon the central tragedy. Each of his two evangelists tell similar stories, each in different dramatic accents: John with the dark chromaticism of his own internal suffering – you hear this in the very first stabbing notes of the chorus – and Matthew in broader strokes in which the world’s entire population participates. The beauty of the music, the genius of both composers’ reactions to the drama, achieves a universality beyond any narrow identity as a Christian tract. The moment of deepest personal tragedy in all three retellings – Peter’s denial of Jesus, and his immediate stab of conscience – is set to music of such poignancy (“Thy rebuke” in Messiah, the harrowing dissonance of the “bitter weeping” in John and, most of all, the aria “Erbarme dich” in Matthew) that just writing about it brings on the shivers. These episodes most meaningfully hold the mirror up to humanity’s vulnerable center. No composer since the time of Bach and Handel has had the effrontery to invent new music to retell the power of this ancient, vivid legend – nobody, that is, until Osvaldo Golijov in his St. Mark Passion, which is more like chutzpah than effrontery (and wonderful of its kind).

Word had been circulating for years about the work of Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium Japan, and here they were, starting a countrywide tour (but performing both the St. John and St. Matthew Passions only in Los Angeles, lucky us). Born in Kobe in 1954, Suzuki began as a harpsichordist and organist, studied in the Netherlands, and returned to Japan with the single ambition of conducting Bach in historically informed performances with all that implies – gut strings, wooden woodwinds, portative organs. He and the Collegium are currently recording all 200-plus of the Bach cantatas. In a radio interview he claimed to have never conducted a “normal” orchestra. At Royce he used a chorus of 12 and an orchestra of 18 for the St. John, doubling those forces for the polychoric demands of the St. Matthew with, in that work, two of the vocal soloists substituting for the third chorus of treble voices in the opening section. Of the soloists, two were Japanese, three European. The smallest, and the loudest, was a tenor named Makoto Sakurada, and he was phenomenal.

So, in fact, was quite a lot else as well. Looking from the back like a ghost from early Kurosawa, his crown of pure-white hair grazing his shoulders, both his hands seeming to mold the music in midair, Suzuki drew from his mostly young orchestra sounds lithe and bright, marvelously in tune. Tempos tended toward the fast side, perhaps a shade excessively in the chorales. Gerd Türk was the Evangelist both nights, performing with remarkable dramatic intensity, particularly memorable for his hate-filled pronunciation of the name “Barabbas.” Jochen Kupfer, a Boris Godunov kind of bass, was the Jesus in St. John. Peter Kooij, the St. Matthew Jesus, performed with less voice but better style. Male alto Robin Blaze sang the “Erbarme dich” rather coldly; soprano Yukari Nonoshita sang her arias prettily, aside from a tendency to bite off the ends of phrases.

The miracle of these passions, one of them, anyway, is the richness in the interaction of words and harmonies. It was sheer incompetence, therefore, that the management at Royce furnished no complete printed text, and no hall lighting to read even the fragments of text that were provided. I complained to a couple of the powers that be, but UCLA’s David Sefton was too busy shaking hands, and Frank Salomon, the tour manager (and head of the distinguished Marlboro Festival), suggested that people could just listen to the music – a most unsatisfactory response. UCLA has produced some splendid music making in the past; can it be that people there have now stopped caring?

Messiah was part of the L.A. Chamber Orchestra’s series; that management at least knew to provide a full printed text, along with Alan Chapman’s enlightening pre-concert narrative. Grant Gershon conducted, with a small contingent from his Master Chorale; among the soloists, soprano Elissa Johnston and tenor Michael Slattery were outstanding, bass-baritone James Creswell slightly less so, and mezzo-soprano Kate Butler practically inaudible.

In 1789 the distinguished music patron Baron von Swieten, who was sparking a one-man baroque revival in Vienna, hired Mozart to prepare an update of Handel’s by-then-famous score; in contrast to our own history-obsessed times, an “authentic” Messiah in Handel’s pristine scoring would have been unthinkable to a 1789 audience. (Similarly, all the famous Bach “revivals” instigated by Felix Mendelssohn and his followers four decades later were perpetrated to heavily romanticized re-orchestrations. Heaven preserve us from some future well-intended festival of Bach cantatas re-scored for clarinets, harps and tinkling chimes as installed in the 1850s by the fine Victorian hand of Sir Joseph Barnby – best known today for his royal-purple song setting of Lord Tennyson’s “Sweet and Low.”)

The “Mozart” Messiah, used in the Royce Hall performance, was an occasion of misguided exhumation. For every new touch that might properly be linked to a Mozartian sensibility – the notion of starting some of the big choral numbers with just a vocal quartet so as to enhance the big-bang entry by the chorus later on, the timpani under the great outbursts in “For unto us a Child is born” – there were other moments in which the familiar Mozartian orchestral magic, of winds and horns in rich harmony, or of the strings dancing out a countermelody above one of Handel’s solemn tunes, were simply alien to enlightened 2003 ears. If such stiff-backed tributes to the ideals of the past must be inflicted on us, better so at least with the marvelous winds and brass of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. It would be even better so, however, with the unbroken strength of Handel’s masterpiece as he himself had once dreamed it, not yet in need of fixing.

Iannis Xenakis’ Persephassa went zooming around the inner space of Zipper Hall the other night, and for the length of that journey – half an hour, give or take – it obliged me to believe that music couldn’t get any better. The fresh air on Grand Avenue, and the gleam of Frank Gehry’s nascent monster across the street, restored my sense of proportion, but the sound of Xenakis’ 34-year-old creation remains with me 10 days later, a welcome presence.

The piece is for percussion, and was the final work on the Green Umbrella program by that bang-up ensemble from UC San Diego known as “red fish blue fish” (words from another notable San Diegan, Dr. Seuss). Riding high along pathways blazed by John Cage and Lou Harrison, among others, Steven Schick’s eight-member ensemble busies itself creating, reviving and maintaining a marvelous repertory of percussion works. Music by Cage was on this program, as was Steve Reich’s exhilarating Music for Mallet Instruments (which also enlists the services of a vocal trio plus electronic keyboard); it fell to Xenakis, with works fore and aft, to steal the evening. I have occasionally had trouble with Xenakis and his self-proclaimed mysticism, defined in some works weighed down in latter-day mathematics and ancient symbolism; the music last week broke through and bedazzled.

Persephassa dates from 1969, early in what became a huge legacy of works for unusually constituted instrumental groups. Six groups of assorted percussion instruments, one player to each group, were spread around the two side balconies at Zipper; the groups “answered” one another antiphonally across the hall, and at the end they created the sense of a continuous passage of sound from one player to the next, increasing in speed and complexity and, thus, tightening its hold on the listener. The acoustics at Zipper, which I have praised at “normally” constituted events, survived this test as well; the music – “a calamitous barrage of strident noises and powerful, unpredictable silences,” in Schick’s words – hung suspended. Initially the players struck what sounded like normal drummers’ exercises; this, too, increased in complexity to match the increasing sense of movement. “Calamitous” it certainly was, also overpowering. I can still feel it as I write.

Kassandra (1987) began the program: a monodrama, with words from Aeschylus, for a singer (UCSD’s remarkable Philip Larson) who must alternate between a falsetto (for the rejected Cassandra as death nears) and a bass for the commenting chorus, spurred by the insistent pounding of Schick’s percussion. The two Cage works were slighter stuff, but the Inlets — for players tilting water-filled conch shells to produce an enchanting (and remarkably varied) counterpoint of gurgle – became by some distance the evening’s charmer.

Across the street two days earlier, the Philharmonic busied itself with the premiere of a trombone concerto by Augusta Read Thomas, written for and played by Ralph Sauer – the latest in the series of solo works commissioned by the orchestra for its principals. There are more trombone concertos around than you’d think – even one by Rimsky-Korsakov – but this agreeable newcomer may be somewhat different, perhaps even a cut above the average. In their e-mail correspondence – which is how pieces often get composed nowadays – Sauer requested a lyrical kind of piece from Thomas, specifically one with a notable absence of that most timeworn of trombone mannerisms, the glissandos familiar from burlesque-theater bands and circuses. There are, indeed, no trombone slides in Gustie Thomas’ new piece, and a rather appealing amount of melody. Some of the latter teeters on the edge of jazziness, and does so quite nicely. The piece bears the title Canticle Weaving; I’m not sure about “Canticle,” but the “weaving,” the way the soloist moves in and out of the ensemble, I found most attractive. The L.A. Times‘ Mark Swed found that the tone of the work put him in mind of the U.N.’s Kofi Annan; maybe so, but I think I heard a little Bing Crosby, too.

“I hate dead music,” said the composer in her lively and informative pre-concert talk, and she should have no fears on that score from Canticle Weaving. Brahms’ Double Concerto, which ended the program, is about as dead as any music I can name. Only four opus numbers separate it from the Fourth Symphony, which is sad and mellow and reminiscent of leaves in autumn, but not dead. The Double Concerto gives us strained and half-formed melodic shapes pushing their way through a dense and hostile orchestration. Writers whom I otherwise admire single out the slow movement as an example of unfettered and sublime melody; I find it clumsy beyond redemption, and there you are. To make any point the “Double” needs the affected arrogance of phrase that Heifetz brought to it on either of his recordings; the performance by the Philharmonic’s Bing Wang and Ben Hong was merely careful and musical and, thus, excruciating. The program began with early Richard Strauss beer-garden, the one-movement Serenade for Winds, which, being early Strauss and composed for a Mozartian ensemble, some people mistake for youthful exuberance. In any case, Augusta Read Thomas couldn’t have chosen better program mates to get her own music to kick up its heels and dance until dawn.

Hopes for a local revival of Les Troyens to help celebrate the Berlioz bicentennial are probably unrealistic in these troubled times. Meanwhile there is a superb performance, from the 2000 Salzburg Festival, produced on two DVD discs on the ArtHaus label distributed by Naxos. Sylvain Cambreling was the conductor, the late Herbert Wernicke was the designer and director, Jon Villars (not to be confused, alas, with Jon Vickers but otherwise excellent) was the Aeneas, and Deborah Polaski sang the roles of Cassandra and Dido. Wernicke’s production is stark: Two walls form an angle, with open space in back that suggests the horrors of war and subsequent desolation. The best-of-all news is that the ballets, which form the dreariest aspect of any complete Troyens you’ve ever seen (including the one recently at the Met), have been cut. Cut. Gone.

Polaski is a strong, intense singer; Villars is not the ultimate hero, but his work is clean and intelligent. Cambreling, still too little known here (except for a week at the Hollywood Bowl – small change!), leads a finely proportioned performance with special eloquence from the winds and horns of his Orchestre de Paris. The chances of a live-action Troyens being what they are hereabouts these days, this new video is a fairer-than-fair facsimile.