So I've Heard

Photo by Robert Millard

To the accusers of deprivation in the ranks of ardent Wagnerians, the Los Angeles Opera throws a small bone now and then, the current offering being The Flying Dutchman, which runs through April 12. The shortest and goofiest score in the Wagner canon, its hints of later mastery mingled with a leaning toward cute folksiness that the composer would soon outgrow, the Dutchman soars onto the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stage with a comparable blend: an adequate, if not thrilling, musical performance mingled with some stage business that sometimes enhances the action and sometimes doesn’t.

Julie Taymor’s production was first visited upon local audiences in September 1995, her first American operatic staging after her European Magic Flute and Salome and her Emmy-winning Kabuki-style re-creation of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. The term “Eurotrash” had barely infiltrated the American critical vocabulary, and the nonsense Taymor inflicted upon Wagner’s first important opera – a whole ‘nother level at least as complex as Wagner’s own scenario – was looked upon as the work of individual kookiness. An old man chased a mobile park bench during the overture; headless dress dummies danced during the “Spinning Chorus”; a small child played with dolls and ship models to mirror the action. One good curse – Satan’s anathema against the Dutchman himself – seems to elicit another, and Taymor’s atrocity was merely the latest burden visited upon this opera soon after Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s infamous and much-booed San Francisco version. In that one, the entire action took place during a dream by the Steersman, the opera’s most dispensable character.

The current revival, “bone” though it be, has at least been stripped of most of the aforementioned gristle, and this is all the more surprising, since the director entrusted with this restaging, Vera Calábria, had also been Ponnelle’s assistant. As of the day before the performance, Calábria told me, she had not yet even met Julie Taymor – who was actually in town to stage something at the Oscars. The musical performance is not exactly deluxe, but the staging is now clean and sensible, and there is plenty of time to marvel at the one surviving masterpiece, George Tsypin’s breakaway, mobile, skeletal structure that serves both as ship and as seafarer’s cottage. His design does, however, necessitate an intermission to accomplish a set change, violating Wagner’s preference for a nonstop performance. (On opening night, the production did take on a Marxist – as in Groucho – overtone, as a small flap in the scenery got stuck, and resisted the efforts of crawling, highly visible stagehands to loosen it.)

Bernd Weikl has been the Wagnerian lyric baritone of choice for rather a while, and, alas, this has begun to show; his Dutchman was a creature of only sporadic eloquence. Matti Salminen, the Daland, has been around for almost as long, but that resonant, hearty basso of his remains firmly anchored. The Senta, a Russian soprano named Mlada Khoudoley, sang both sweetly and loud; she managed some beautiful tones during the agonizingly long “Senta’s Ballad” but seemed to tire toward the end. The German-Polish conductor, Klaus Weise, seemed, on the other hand, to tire from the beginning.

On the one hand, the classical compact-disc industry beats a wholesale retreat from interesting repertory – new music, new performance concepts, new discoveries of ancient treasures. On the other, there is the inscrutable project known as Andante. An offshoot and namesake of the online music magazine, it zooms forward prestissimo con moto with a growing catalog of ancient and honorable bygone performances chosen with taste but also with the old-fashioned collectors’ mania that I thought had vanished with the demise of the 78-rpm shellac – but which glows again in Tim Page’s knowledgeable, passionate program essays with each volume. The Andante collection now stands at 29 multidisc volumes; four new issues are at hand, released next Tuesday. (You can order from Andante.com, and a few stores carry them. The per-disc price, by the way, has just come down a tad.)

Andante offers a set of the last three Bruckner symphonies, in performances by Karl Böhm, Herbert von Karajan and Wilhelm Furtwängler taken off Austrian radio broadcasts. All three symphonies are available in dozens upon dozens of competing performances, including studio recordings by the same three conductors; apparently there are collectors who must add yet another Furtwängler Bruckner Eighth to those already listed in Schwann, or Stravinsky conducting the Symphony of Psalms in a wheezy recording barely into electrical technology, to stand in humble proximity alongside the infinitely more audible later version.

Yet there are treasures beyond measure. Four discs of broadcast performances by Eduard van Beinum and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, dating from 1940 to 1958 and therefore in mono, suggest what Los Angeles lost in the way of masterful, self-effacing music making when this conductor died after only two years here. The wisdom here is overpowering: wonderful, clear-tinted Debussy, a Beethoven Third Piano Concerto with the single-named Solomon, a Bach concerto with the visionary pianist Dinu Lipatti, Mozart with Yehudi Menuhin before he became just another fiddler.

The best of these new sets is the most curious: three discs devoted to just two of Beethoven’s 10 violin sonatas in multiple performances, recorded between 1936 and 1950, and amazing in the breadth of differences from one to another. Here, for example, are four versions of the tumultuous “Kreutzer” Sonata: the sweet-toned sentiment of Fritz Kreisler, with Franz Rupp’s piano sounding as if it’s in the next room; the scholarly detachment of Germany’s Georg Kulenkampff, with the noble Wilhelm Kempff at the piano; the driving force of Adolf Busch’s violin, give or take a few squeezed notes, with the exuberant Rudolf Serkin keeping abreast. Then there is one more performance, Joseph Szigeti performing at the Library of Congress in 1940 with Bela Bartók at the piano, digging into the music at white heat, uncovering hitherto unknown suggestions that Beethoven may have had Gypsy blood, and transforming music we thought we knew pretty well into a newly minted thing of flame and cataclysm.

The other sonata is the blithe, ingratiating F major, sometimes known as the “Spring,” and the performance of choice is sublime: Szymon Goldberg and Lili Kraus, recorded in 1936 in an outpouring of affectionate musical togetherness that could well stand as the full definition of chamber music. They don’t play like that anymore, and it’s great that Andante-
dot-com is around to remind us of when they did.

Photo by Cylla Von Tiedemann

People have been heard to say, once in a while, that chamber music is an alien art hereabouts, that Los Angeles prefers its music loud. That might have been the case at one time – in the 1980s, say, when the Sequoia Quartet flourished and then foundered, when a brave festival called Chamber Music L.A. started out with large and friendly audiences and then lost them, when the comfort and excellent acoustics of Ambassador Auditorium were reason enough to look forward to an evening of small and subtle sounds – but not reason enough to keep it open.

It would be difficult to corroborate that sentiment now, however. In the last month or so, extraordinary events have taken place in the realm of the small sound. The Kronos Quartet has been in residence at UCLA, with an agreeably messy mixed-media program that drew a big crowd to Royce Hall and, a few nights later, a collaboration with the Merce Cunningham dancers in a work by John Cage. Also at UCLA, the Pacifica Quartet gave its marathon Elliott Carter program, with music hard to like but with poised, fearless playing impossible to resist. The Ardittis came to the County Museum and, as previously noted, conquered. The Penderecki Quartet – Canadian despite its title – returned to LACMA with two thought-provoking programs. The Philharmonic’s Chamber Music Society played Ravel and John Adams at the University of Judaism’s Gindi Auditorium, and, just last week, there was a profoundly delightful program by members of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra – the second of three “Conversations” concerts – that drew a capacity crowd to Zipper Hall, fed them on hors d’oeuvres and then on Mozart, Mendelssohn, and bright and lively discourse.

That hall – named for the distinguished Viennese conductor and teacher Herbert Zipper, survivor of Dachau and Buchenwald, who spent his last years in Los Angeles – has itself been a major cause of the chamber-music upsurge. At 416 seats, it is the perfect size for chamber concerts. The acoustics are embracing; the audience can hear the music making, and so, LACO’s Jeff Kahane reported at this concert, can the players. Last week’s concert was beautifully designed to make people fall in love with music. First there was Mozart’s Quintet for Piano and Winds, which Mozart himself claimed to love above all his works (and with good reason). Kahane’s piano for this work was a reconstructed Broadwood instrument from 1829 – already a little late for 1784 chamber music, but marvelous to hear for its clarity and definition and for the way it became part of the ensemble.

Then came other music, less familiar but of comparable delight, Mendelssohn’s B-minor Quartet, for piano and strings: the composer’s Opus 3, dating from his 14th year, rambunctious and exuberant. (“Some brat!” noted Kahane in the post-concert talk.) For this the piano was Zipper’s own Fazioli supermachine. After the concert there was a spirited and extended QA that included Kahane, the participants and the man who had rebuilt the old piano. I learned a lot; nobody seemed to want to leave. The whole evening, in fact, could be reckoned a kind of chamber music. Kahane is a treasure, for the way the music warmed him and then for the way he warmed the room. The last “Conversations” program this season is on April 10.

Bela Bartók’s Fourth Quartet concluded the Penderecki Quartet’s first program; Janácek’s Second Quartet concluded the second. Both works were composed in 1928, share some aspects and differ in others. The Bartók paints a landscape, moonlit at times, eerie and tenebrous at others; Count Dracula could be riding by, and his private corpse collection might be dancing and rattling bones. Every measure seems to contain a new way of composing for these four instruments. Janácek paints an interior landscape: the strange torments of an unfulfilled lover caught up in a ménage à trois, hopelessly dreaming of making babies with his mistress, obediently tagging along with that lady and her husband, working off the obvious frustrations in music – and in this work (subtitled “Intimate Letters”) in particular. The music invents no new sounds, as did Bartók; still, it leaves one shaken, sharing in the unrequited longings typified in the final distorted ending that actually ends nothing – except for Janácek himself, who died shortly after completing the work.

The able young Pendereckis played both works with superb intensity – hair-raising, actually, in the Janácek. They began their first program with Vistas, a 1989 work by the Israeli-born Shulamit Ran. Its roots are clear: the augmented seconds and self-flagellating geschrei indigenous in the Hebraic legacy, coupled with a vibrant rhythmic pulse that may be the composer’s own. Canadian Peter Hatch’s Gathered Evidence bears a 2002 date, but apparently wants to resurrect the cute computer and sampler tricks of decades past; it managed to be both brief and overextended. Haydn and Brahms filled out the second program: the Haydn (Opus 3, No. 3) most ingratiating, the Brahms (Opus 67) rather glum. The program notes went into detail to prove that the first quartet was probably not actually by Haydn. Still, if some other composer created music of such charm, with so many original Haydnesque twists, wouldn’t you think there’d be a whole raft of his other great works awaiting discovery? This is the kind of stuff that musicologists buzz over hour after hour; meanwhile, we have this one beautiful work, and that should be enough.

The Philharmonic’s chamber program tied into the John Adams week with the brief China Gates for piano at the start and the nose-thumbing charm of John’s Book of Alleged Dances at the end; Ravel’s A-minor Trio, again rather glumly played, came in the middle. Better than any of this, however, were the Poèmes de Ronsard, a pair of songs for soprano and flute by Albert Roussel, sung by Christine Brandes and by Catherine Ransom’s magic flute: elegant, graceful, intertwined melodies by a little-known French composer of neoclassic bent who’s known, if at all, for his jaunty Third Symphony.

The crowd at Gindi was surprisingly sparse; these chamber concerts used to draw well, especially among the University of Judaism loyalists. Last year the Philharmonic moved the series across the freeway to the Skirball Center’s new Ahmanson Hall, an ugly and uncomfortable venue; the major conversational topic all year was the hall itself. After a year the concerts returned to Gindi, not exactly a palace for the arts, but at least a place where you could get to your seat without cracking a shinbone. Now word needs to re-circulate: Come back, o patrons; the Philharmonic needs you and chamber music needs you!

If you needed a couple of perfect lab specimens to illustrate the philosophical gap between East Coast and West Coast music, you couldn’t find worthier paradigms than the events at either end of a recent five-day stretch. At one end, Elliott Carter’s string quartets; at the other, John Adams’ El Niño. Anyone who doesn’t consider Adams the greatest living American composer probably thinks that of Carter; vive la différence.

Carter’s five quartets appeared from 1950 to 1995: 45 years in a life of prolific creativity in any genre you can name. Last year, at 94, he even finally got around to writing an opera – not much of one, to be sure, but an Elliott Carter opera nevertheless. New York is his power base; the Brits also accord him top dollar. Here is Britain’s Andrew Porter, writing in The New Yorker about Carter’s Second Quartet (1959), in prose that is, of itself, downright Cartesian:

“Consider the Presto scherzando movement of his Second Quartet, marked to be played ‘with rhythmic precision in all parts.’ To achieve precision in the first measure, that measure of five quarter-notes (which lasts only one and seven-tenths seconds) must be divided into 60 equal parts. The first violin must enter on the counts of 20, 25 and 29; the second violin on one, 16, 31 and 46; the viola on 49 and 58 . . .”

Am I missing something here? Was I derelict in neglecting to take my stopwatch and slide rule to UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall on the night in early March when the Pacifica Quartet undertook not one but all five of these Carter works? What I heard that night was nearly three hours of music of phenomenally dense and gritty contrapuntal energy. The First Quartet began with a huge span of melody, a cello solo reaching toward far horizons; it could have been an invocation to the whole long evening. I waited in vain for other music of comparable eloquence. What was most amazing was how little change the language of the music actually went through from one work to another, one decade to the next – beyond the printed information that such and such a work was built out of two pairs of instruments performing differently and that another consisted of simultaneous mixed tempos.

Now and then I thought about Beethoven, about the five quartets at the end of his life, composed over the three years that also produced the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony, about how each of those five works seemed to invent its own language, and how each of these languages embodied a new and important message to the listener. From inside these works of Carter I got no message, beyond the news that there were wheels going ’round, masterfully turned. Fine as the playing was by this remarkable young ensemble – currently in residence at Northwestern – I think that the concert did disservice, to Carter and certainly to the dwindling audience. A spot of Beethoven or of Haydn or – you name it – would have helped. During one of the intermissions, a group of concertgoers linked arms and strolled down a corridor singing “Come Back to Sorrento.” Now that’s what you call protest.

There were other wheels going around, leading to El Niño at the Music Center last week: a citywide series of conversations, colloquiums, musical homages, all serving to invest the main event with an aura of importance that was, this once, appropriate and deserved. The work itself is a kind of masterpiece – music not merely about itself and its metrical ratios but with a sense of vast outreach through open windows.

The genius of the work begins in its poetic sources, a panorama – assembled by Adams himself with the collaboration of Peter Sellars – that includes the folkish symbolism of the Apocryphal Gospels, the visions of Hildegard von Bingen, the anguished outcries of contemporary Latino witnesses, the latter-day inquisitions that mirror the horrors of Herod and his court. All this Adams has splendidly underlined with his own range of musical resource: orchestra and chorus raging in furious Handelian counterpoint, a rock bass line to propel the music at other moments, a lament over a contemporary massacre in which the breath simply stops, in the music and in the hearers as well. At the end a children’s chorus and a solo guitar return the music to the silence out of which, two hours before, the miracle of the Nativity first took musical shape. At the pre-concert talk, the pathetically ill-advised interlocutor tried to force Adams into admitting a kinship with Osvaldo Golijov’s vastly different Passion Oratorio. “My name is John Adams,” said John Adams, and that was that.

Peter Sellars’ staging, which I had seen in San Francisco two years ago and later on DVD, was considerably clarified this time from the onstage gridlock that had led to a wearying sensory overload; just the expedient of placing Salonen’s orchestra in the pit made a difference. The chorus, barefoot and casually dressed, formed memorable tableaux on the bare stage floor; so did the three dancers, rising out of the vocal group; so did the three countertenor members of Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices, who served as annunciatory angels; so did the made-in-heaven trio – Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Willard White – who have been with the work from the beginning.

Peter Sellars’ film remains extra baggage; Adams’ music will survive on its own. This time, because of the roomier stage design, I did not find the film as oppressive as I had in San Francisco; it is what it is, a visual metaphor for the dramatic intent of the music, a retelling of the musical content on less subtle terms. As a Los Angeles experience, the translation of the Nativity story into a filmed drama among recognizable young people in a recognizable habitat creates some sense of identity. Someday, assuming the continued popularity of El Niño as it truly deserves, the film might serve as a bridge to future performances in more modest settings where seats don’t cost the $82 of last week’s Music Center premiere, and the audience is encouraged to dress down to match the performers onstage.

Having served us nobly, for the past 30 years or so, in resurrecting both the music of the distant past and its surrounding ambiance – baroque chamber music in a baroque-rip-off Pasadena mansion, say – MaryAnn Bonino’s Da Camera Society has now brought its explorations to within shooting range of nowadays. The substance on a recent sunny Sunday was some of the musical monkeying that had been perpetrated hereabouts in and around the 1970s. The chosen venue was the reconverted railroad freight depot that now houses the anything-but-retro enclave of architectural wisdom known as SCI-Arc. For baroque gimcrackery, substitute raw concrete. The entertainment, too, was solid.

Ah, the ’70s! In New York the movement known as Fluxus had served to rekindle the anything-goes spirit of Dada of the recent past: the topless Charlotte Moorman playing her cello (not too well); Nam June Paik mooning the audience (sparse, I’m happy to report); La Monte Young and his smashed (cheapo) violins. Something of Fluxus emigrated to CalArts in its early days, back when it was the only enclave of human habitation up on the hills above Valencia. Most of the membership of the current California E.A.R. Unit – which performed at the concert two weeks ago – were students at CalArts in those days. You could trace their Fluxus inheritance right at the start, as the group distributed the afternoon’s printed programs to the crowd in the form of paper airplanes. Later on, indeed, a violin got smashed.

There was greater substance in other of the afternoon’s music, but not necessarily higher excellence. There was Henry Brant, doing then what he does now, trying to enhance the impact of some basically academic note-spinning by spreading the performers around the space. There was some of Frank Zappa’s indigestible goulash, stirring half a dozen kinds of music (rock, blues, 12-tone, misunderstood Varèse) into one cacophonous proclamation that Unplayable Is Preferable. There were early pieces by composers on their way up – James Tenney, Steven Mosko, Daniel Lentz – in show-off styles they would soon disown. And there was one piece, Mel Powell’s serene, fragrant Immobiles for instruments delicately surrounded by electronic murmurings, that on the criterion of pure quality was worthier than anything else that day.

But the concert wasn’t so much about quality as spirit. Everything that was happening in the ’70s – at least everything that was sampled at this one exhilarating event – seemed to be happening for the first time. Electronic music was a brand-new box of toys only recently opened. Other composers – Yannis Xenakis, for one – would invent more interesting uses for space than Henry Brant had found. Mel Powell would create a more extensive, even more beautiful legacy than this one small jewel. As the low man in the critics’ hierarchy at The New York Times, I was assigned to most of the Fluxus events at Carnegie Recital Hall and other low-rent venues way back when, but I don’t remember any of them as being as much fun, or as loaded with as much truly smart joyousness, as the E.A.R. Unit provides these days. It was fun reliving the past for that one afternoon – and the SCI-Arc building, teeming with young, creative impulse, was surely worth the trip – but I prefer being here.

Later that same Sunday there was Karita Mattila’s vocal recital at the Music Center, almost all of it consisting of uninteresting music lit up by radiant artistry. She is an extraordinary singer, to be sure. I haven’t heard anyone in a long time with her ability to turn notes into insinuations, to shape a musical phrase into a caress at one moment, a defiance at another, and at another, thanksgiving at the mere existence of birds, trees and iridescent dragonflies. I also haven’t heard anyone in a long time so aware of the incomparable value of working with a pianist – the irreplaceable Martin Katz – as a collaborator and not just a tag-along accompanist.

Yet the program was almost consistently second-rate: a wad of Henri Duparc, when the heart cried out for Debussy; a wayward mess of Sibelius, although the one about the dragonfly had its prettiness; five inferior chunks of Rachmaninoff. Dvorak’s Gypsy Songs, though not exactly masterworks, were lit up with Mattila’s lovely sense of warm humor; the one familiar number from the set, “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” was also the evening’s one excursion into pure, unalloyed beauty. I want her back, in Schumann and Debussy.

Later in the week she joined compatriot Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic in the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss, sang them gorgeously, but reminded me of how much I dislike these insipidities from the composer’s senile years. I know those words are impolite; one must genuflect before a bygone celebrity who, at 80 or so, can still hold a pen. Strauss wrote pretty songs, even attractive songs, in his early years. He also had a unique knack of composing to make the soprano voice sound ravishing beyond the strengths of the music itself, and we have the dangerously seductive Rosenkavalier and the unspeakable Arabella to bear this out. That gift remained; the Four Last Songs exist to melt strong hearts from the vocal sheen of an Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, perhaps a Renée Fleming. Mattila, by the same token, did not quite make them work; her performance, for all its thrust, suffered from an excess of intelligence. The audience did, of course, go gaga, as well they should.

The program also included Witold Lutoslawski’s Fourth Symphony, whose world premiere the Philharmonic had given in 1993. It remains a troublesome work. Here again you have to admire the aging composer, and for better reasons than for Strauss. There are wonderful sounds here; the very first measures, with the orchestra emerging from a dark hole and the winds sounding a dire imprecation, arrest the attention. But there is a disturbing disconnectedness about the piece, moments of a dead stop and a resumption somewhere else, that inspires me with the awful suspicion that this marvelous, cherishable composer had run out of energy too soon. The great works of Lutoslawski, not much before this final essay, are robust and teeming; in their shadow, this one work makes me wish it didn’t exist.

MARK-ANTHONY TURNAGE LOOKS like a bloke and composes like a diabolical horde. He first invaded our awareness at Ojai in 2000 with Blood on the Floor, 70 minutes of exquisitely controlled mayhem. The title came from one of Francis Bacon’s lurid canvases; if ever sight and sound smashed against each other in the formation of a single sensual exercise, this was it – among the crickets and woodpeckers of Ojai in the midst of a wholesale Brit invasion masterminded by Sir Simon Rattle, or at home, where the recording is my favorite means of drowning out my neighbor’s dog.

Blood on the Floor was begun in 1993; Your Rockaby, which the Philharmonic performed under Sir Andrew Davis two weekends ago, came just before. Its title is from Samuel Beckett, a monologue by an ancient crone rocking herself to death. The two works are linked, in a sense; they both demand feats of super- (or maybe sub-) human virtuosity from a saxophone soloist – a frenzied soprano sax in Rockaby, several sizes in Blood. Britain’s Martin Robertson, who fulfills those demands, was at Ojai in 2000, was here for Your Rockaby and has recorded both works on Decca-Argo.

There is an explosiveness in Turnage’s music that seems to come from a constant sense of collision and not very much assimilation. Jazz plays an important role, but it’s a clean, driving, up-to-date kind of jazz that doesn’t want much to do with traditional sources. The edges between this new jazz – which sounds improvised at times but may, for all I know, be completely written out – and the other stuff (quite a lot of Hans Werner Henze and the marvelous, rational textures of the Better Brits like Oliver Knussen) are left raw and gritty. The connections with Francis Bacon are clear and vivid. I remember my first contact with Bacon’s work; I couldn’t get past the suspicion that someone was screaming at me. I learned to like it, but it took time and effort. I think Turnage is a powerful and important composer. Looking at that plain Midlands face, you first want to think about Yorkshire pudding. Then the music comes on.

Turnage and Thomas Adès have a place among the aforementioned Better Brits. Gustav Holst, whose The Planets shared the program with the Turnage, does not. He survives on that one piece, whose sustaining force gets an inexplicable boost from a tenuous connection with Trekkie and Jedi freaks, and from the concert promoters who invent nonexistent connections between the light-show effects of those movies and the mashed-potato turgidity of Holst’s music. Okay, the Holst gets a hearing now and then; that does no harm. The performance under Davis was just okay, even if you could notice a spot of cold brown gravy over the potatoes now and then. At the end – some of my letter writers insist that I say – many in the audience stood and cheered. There is one work by Holst that I truly admire, a half-hour choral piece called The Hymn of Jesus, one of those minglings of old modalities and late-romantic resonances – as also in Vaughan Williams, some of the better William Walton and the weak-tea but somehow lovable Gerald Finzi. Alas, no recording of the Holst exists, at least in my latest catalog. Forty performances of The Planets; not one of The Hymn of Jesus.

AT LAST WEEK’S GREEN UMBRELLA at Zipper Hall, there were more bundles from Britain. Thomas Adès’ Cardiac Arrest rescued the flag but hardly saved the day – four jolly minutes of reworking a piece by Madness, a British ska/pop group: delightful, but too soon over. (These Brits with their titles!)

I try to listen to Judith Weir’s music without remembering a night at the Santa Fe Opera House that belongs beside my most painful memories, dental or otherwise: an insanely wrong-headed offering called A Night at the Chinese Opera, performed during one of Santa Fe’s famous monsoons before they had filled in the roof. Thread!, which laid claim to 20 minutes in Zipper’s drier confines, was more on the same dam fool level: a musical setting, for small orchestra and narrator, of nothing less than the Bayeux tapestry – the narrator reading off the historical account of the Norman Conquest stitched to the top of the tapestry, the orchestra illustrating the events shown below in a bland, Silly Symphony style that seemed intent on reducing that noble artwork to rubble and ridicule. In my job I hear good music, I hear bad music.
I don’t often hear music that is embarrassing – not while

I still
have the strength to make it to the

exit doors. This piece was simply embarrassing; I blush to think that Ms. Weir and I are in the same line of work.

James MacMillan conducted, and gave over the rest of the concert to his own piece, called Parthenogenesis – this the same week that the anti-cloning bill cleared the House of Representatives. Yes, that’s what this piece is, I think, about: a dramatic dissertation concerning reincarnation, virgin birth and fallen angels, all set to 50 or so minutes of a blankness so featureless that I actually came to feel it as a vacuum. MacMillan is popular; his music can be fun when Evelyn Glennie is on hand to beat out the rhythms. If his piece, and that of his Scots compatriot Judith Weir, were an attempt at reconciliation with the Colonies, make mine oatmeal.

At Mark Robson’s Piano Spheres recital at Zipper Hall the week before, there was the rare chance to hear all 12 of Claude Debussy’s Etudes, his last music for piano and almost his last work in any medium. It was an extraordinary experience, an encounter with the aging, ailing Debussy, a still-living mind in a wasting body, bequeathing a view over the realm of melody, harmony and resonance comparable to the great, philosophical late works of Bach – The Art of the Fugue and, even more, The Musical Offering. They are also, of course, explorations into piano technique comparable – as Debussy admitted – to the Chopin Etudes, but these are bigger works altogether. They are less often heard than Debussy’s earlier works with the colorful titles; I don’t remember ever hearing the whole set at once. But they are better that way, because they do feed off one another. Robson’s performance was, as usual, immaculate, wise and loving; he has become one of our most valuable local artists.

FINALLY, THERE IS CLOCKS AND Clouds. I have entertained a private passion for György Ligeti’s 14-minute gathering of moonbeams and distant thunderclaps ever since Esa-Pekka Salonen performed it with the Philharmonic in 1993. It was scheduled for inclusion in Salonen’s complete Ligeti survey on Sony; the release is assigned a number in the discography in Paul Griffiths’ splendid biography. It never happened; a new recording from other sources, out this month on Teldec, is the first ever. The new disc includes the Violin Concerto, which was also on that Salonen concert (along with Debussy, a memorable matchup). The performances are led by Reinbert de Leeuw with his Amsterdam-based Schoenberg Ensemble; Frank Peter Zimmermann is the phenomenal soloist in the Violin Concerto.

“Better than any other living composer,” I wrote in 1993, “Ligeti defines the full panorama of contemporary musical possibilities. At 69 [now 79] his catalog is not large, but his modest legacy embraces the thinking of a man completely in command of the grammar of music and its expressive scope . . . Clocks and Clouds is a work of high delight. Its basic plan sounds simple in the telling: instrumental music of meticulous, metronomic exactitude (i.e., clocks) gradually melting into a nebulous, cloudlike flow, with a superimposed line for a small women’s chorus that reverses the flow. Little side-trips along the way form a constant web of surprise . . .” The title stems from an essay by Karl Popper on the philosophy of science, but Ligeti’s setting transforms scientific images into poetic. The women’s text is notated in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and serves more to define rhythm than melody.

This is a small piece, compared to the 27-minute Violin Concerto, but the two share an important facet of Ligeti’s particular genius, his joy in opening his musical language to all kinds of intrusions beyond the limits of the European systems on which he was raised. In the Violin Concerto there are manic outbursts from, of all strange devices, an ensemble of ocarinas and slide whistles, instruments hooting and chortling in outer-space harmonies that have nothing to do with do-re-mi. The women’s chorus in Clocks and Clouds accomplishes the same, slipping and sliding into a kind of cloud-cuckoo land. Listening to this can be unsettling to ears nurtured on C major; on a tape I snuck when the work was done at the Hollywood Bowl in, I think, 1998, a yahoo in a nearby box can be heard booing his head off. Sad, how some people simply resist the process of delight.

I suppose it’s even possible to resist the delight in the final music on this Ligeti disc, Sippal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel, a set of seven tiny songs for mezzo-soprano (Katalin Károlyi) and percussion based on poems by Sándor Weöres – some of them gibberish, some folksy, some word games – but I cannot. Wonderful, serious fun, mingled with that infectious wisdom that seems built into this cherishable composer. Clocks and Clouds dates from 1973; the Sippal, etc., songs are from 2000. A sense of humor and delight can endure over 27 years only if buttressed by a sense of infinite intelligence, and that Ligeti surely possesses.

THERE IS MORE LIGETI, AND MORE wise humor, on a recent disc in Deutsche Grammophon’s “Echo 20/21” series of reissues and remasterings of major landmarks from the company’s ongoing service to new music. From 1962 come the two sets of play-pieces, Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures, in which wisdom and sheer hilarity play off side by side. The language here, too, often lapses into gibberish, as three vocal soloists have at one another in conversations that rise to high expressive levels without once revealing what they’re about. “The characters,” writes Paul Griffiths, “sing, play games, charm each other, fight, and hope for some response . . . They are a little like children. They are a little like us.” Pierre Boulez conducts the performance; if, as some have, you doubt his ability to manage genuine humor, even wit, you don’t know this disc. The disc also includes Ligeti’s works for organ, performed by Gerd Zacher. If, like some (myself included), you find the idea of humorous organ music an oxymoron, this is the disc to set you straight.

This Deutsche Grammophon series, by the way, is one of the few remaining evidences that someone in the record industry still cares about preserving the world’s musical heritage. The catalog lists 30 items so far, including the Berio Sequenze I wrote about last week, Messiaen’s Saint François, three discs of Boulez and such inexplicable items as André Previn’s Streetcar Named Desire. Berio’s Coro, a recent issue, is one more disc I would describe as indispensable.

The work was completed in 1977, written for the Cologne Radio Chorus and Orchestra, who perform it here under Berio’s direction. The name means, simply, “chorus”; it belongs among the generically named works – Opera, Sinfonia, etc. – that form pillars in Berio’s catalog. Forty chorus members sit among the same number of orchestra members, creating a sound far more homogeneous than the usual orchestra-down-front, chorus-upstage arrangement. A Pablo Neruda poem forms the backbone of the hourlong work: “The pallid day appears . . . come and see the blood in the streets.” Texts twined around Neruda’s lines are mostly drawn from primitive sources: Peruvian, Polynesian, African, Native American, Hebrew. Berio’s music reflects various native chanting techniques; the pileup of information and emotion is astonishing at times. Now and then you become aware of a German chorus struggling with other languages —”a-VAKE LAHV in dis POY” – but Berio apparently clings to his original cast. He’s entitled.

On EMI there is the pulsing, throbbing, exhilarating music of Osvaldo Golijov: Last Rounds for nine strings, which was played here last year by the Philharmonic in an expansion for string orchestra; Lullaby and Doina, heard at a Green Umbrella; Yiddishbuk, at Ojai; and The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind for klezmer clarinet and strings, which the Kronos plays all over the place. It’s all irresistible stuff; the intensity is overwhelming as this composer of many backgrounds locates a vector of his Latino and Yiddish heritage (with maybe a shot of vodka to help the fire along). We’ve heard excellent performances around here, but there is something almost superhuman in the energy these guys – the St. Lawrence String Quartet, with the Ying Quartet and clarinetist Todd Palmer – bring to their work that adds this one more disc to the “essential” pile. Besides, you have to buy discs like these, to tell the folks at EMI – and Sony, and RCA, and whoever else is left – that there is still a market for important recordings, and to tell the Opera Babes to crawl back into the woodwork.

BARRING A STUMBLE OR TWO, the Los Angeles Opera usually strikes gold in its forays into bel canto comic opera: Don Pasquale and L’Elisir d’Amore, La Cenerentola and The Barber of Seville. This is not, as some believe, an easy repertory; its particular demands – clarity, timing, and an exquisite balance so that every line in those marvelous ensembles comes through clean and bright – are as crucial as in any other part of the repertory, perhaps more so. The company’s first Barber was produced as a laff riot, and therefore ruined; my only memory is of Rodney Gilfry, during his “Largo al factotum,” doing some shtick with a chamber pot. It only ran one season, and was replaced in 1997 with Michael Hampe’s intelligent, immensely lovable staging. That production has now been revived at the Music Center, and runs two more times this weekend.

First developed by Hampe during his tenure at the Cologne Opera (but with Mauro Pagano’s plain, serviceable sets actually created at Tokyo’s Kunitachi College of Music), the production remains wildly comic without once transcending the limits of the opera’s wise words and insidiously seductive music. Those who would transfer Mozart’s operatic actions to the far side of the moon, or Wagner’s Ring to the Lincoln Tunnel, are urged to observe Hampe’s demonstration of the superior strength in dramatic truth telling. Much of this strength stems from the simple, imaginative stage blocking. You get the feeling that real people, confronted with situations similar to Rossini’s antics, just might cross the stage in that same way.

Aside from Vladimir Chernov’s dashing, insinuating Figaro, the cast principals are new to the company: gossamer-voiced tenor John Osborn, just a shade too pale of tone, as the amorous Almaviva; bass-baritone Bruno Pola as a Bartolo fatuous but somehow also dignified; basso Simone Alberghini somewhat underpowered as the conniving Basilio. The new Rosina, Romanian mezzo-soprano Carmen Oprisanu, is the production’s real find: a honey-voiced singer with splendid command of vocal acrobatics, graceful to watch, unerring in her comic sense and, again, never departing from the role’s innate dignity.

The opera was presented more or less complete, lacking only Almaviva’s big closing aria, which is cut more often than not. (It does delay the final curtain with not-quite-first-rate music.) Smaller roles were nicely dispatched, best of all by Suzanna Guzmán as the put-upon slavey Berta, and by Dietmar König, who embellished the mute role of the servant Ambrogio with a repertory of showstopping grunts – again, well within the great comic spirit of the original work. Gabriele Ferro’s conducting was convincingly paced, although there were moments when the orchestra did tend to out-shout the singers, at least on opening night. On the other hand, it made me more keenly aware than usual of the further beauty of Rossini’s scoring, the lovely small lights as oboes and clarinets add their ping to all that merriment down in the strings.

I MAY BE STRETCHING A point, but hear me out: Luciano Berio’s Sequenza XIV, which had its U.S. premiere during the Arditti Quartet’s recent concert at LACMA, is another work as purely Italian as Rossini’s comedy, and in many of the same ways. The Sequenze are among my favorite works, so you’ve probably heard this all before: More than merely showoff pieces for various solo instruments (including the voice of Berio’s former wife, Cathy Berberian), they are a series of dialogues within each instrument, each of them a way of regarding the world around it and finding its specific place. The new Sequenza is for solo cello; it was wondrously performed by the Arditti’s Rohan de Saram. It is an extended conversation – 12 or so minutes, if memory serves – by the cello with itself, a melodic gambit played by the bow on strings, an answering phrase by the cello being knocked upon. The conversants touch on many things; by the end we know we’ve been reached by some beautiful, very mysterious wisdom. All the Sequenze work this way, as you can hear in the indispensable Deutsche Grammophon set of the first 13; no two of the works, of course, achieve their epiphany in exactly the same way. That, as I was saying, is the special grace of this cherishable composer.

Helmut Lachenmann’s Third Quartet, subtitled Grido (Scream), was the big work – by the clock, I mean – on the Arditti’s program. Prominent people inform me that Lachenmann is the world’s greatest living composer, so naturally I must pay attention. Thus far I have heard Marino Formenti playing his Syrenade (at last season’s Eclectic Orange), during most of which the pianist depresses the keys without creating sound. I have purchased the discs of his “music with images,” a sort-of opera based on the sad, sad Hans Christian Andersen tale of “The Little Match-Girl,” and from the Web site I read that “Lachenmann’s multilayered music theater becomes what opera . . . always was, a reflection of exterior and inner states of being, analysis and criticism of existing conditions and their aesthetic counterpart . . .” And now I have remained awake through his new Quartet, which, the program notes informed me, is a reaction to the “exterior of our repressible – yet no less real – inner longing for liberated space for the perceptive soul of ‘new’ music.”

Herr Lachenmann is a cruel taskmaster. If these intimidating words of his were to lead to something as tangible as the Berio Sequenza, or Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – which began the Arditti’s program with its challenge delivered out of a cannon’s mouth, so “liberating” that we still cannot fully grasp the extent of the space it demands – I might react with greater pleasure to his demands. (I might, in other words, know what the hell he’s talking about.) But his Quartet turned out to be more empty space sporadically poked through by notes. Morton Feldman’s music is a little like this sometimes, but I find the four hours of Feldman’s For Philip Guston a marvel of concision up against Lachenmann’s half-hour near-silent scream.

EVEN IF WILLIAM BOLCOM’S SONGS of Innocence and of Experience were less excellent than it mostly is, it would rank as a monument to rampant artistic ambitiousness and, for that matter, sheer artistic gall. The fact that last week’s performance at Orange County’s Segerstrom Hall by the Pacific Symphony was the work’s first West Coast hearing – 22 years into its life span – should, however, surprise nobody. It isn’t easy to market a work lasting three hours (with one intermission), by a contemporary composer not yet a household name, demanding the services of an orchestra, a folk band and a rock combo, plus eight vocal soloists, two choruses and a children’s chorus. The first of two performances took place before a smattering of audience, which dwindled further as the evening wore on. None of this had anything to do with the quality of the performance under Carl St. Clair, which was extraordinary top to bottom, or the enterprise of the Pacific Symphony management for producing the work as the centerpiece in a two-week American Composers Festival. Somebody in Orange County is getting things right.

In 1956 the adolescent Bolcom first became obsessed with the 46 doggerel segments of William Blake’s ironic, sardonic survey of the human condition; in 1981 the completed musical setting had become an epitome not only of Blake’s ecstasies and catastrophes but of Bolcom’s own eclectic musical physiognomy. If you know his music at all – the opera A View From the Bridge, recently broadcast by the Met; the slimy gorgeousness of his piano rags; the musicological zeal with which he and his wife, singer Joan Morris, have reconstructed the totality of the American song repertory; the tensile strength of his symphonic works – there should be nothing surprising in the processional over three hours of folk ballads, Handelian pomposities, rock and gut-wrenching outcry.

Moments stand out. A sweet, fragile setting of “The Shepherd” gives way appallingly to a shriek of orchestral pain as Bolcom and Blake go on to survey the underside of life’s meaning. For the best known of the poems, the “fearful symmetry” of Blake’s “Tyger” is framed in the menacing tone of men’s voices hurling out a growling speech-song over a roar of percussion. Near the end the poet visits London, where “the harlot’s curse blasts the newborn infant’s tear,” and Bolcom lights his steps in the glare of screaming synthesizers in “apocalyptic rock tempo.”

A bit overstuffed here and there, somewhat raggedy now and then, Songs of Innocence and of Experience still has the feel of a masterpiece. The performance was, in a word, stupendous. Notable among the soloists were the rock vocalist Nathan Lee Graham, the uncredited harmonica virtuoso Tommy Morgan and, of course, Joan Morris, evergreen, enchanting.

“I SUPPOSE IT MEANS THAT YOU don’t have to be afraid to be pretty . . .” That was Lou Harrison, on a series I produced – some 20 years ago, when KUSC still stood for adventurous radio – exploring the differences between being a composer in California and a composer anywhere else. Since Harrison had spent most of his long life creating music both beautiful and, now and then, rather pretty as well, his disarming and direct statement could be taken to heart. Now Lou has left us, but the words and the music remain.

Beyond question, California’s music is different. The onshore breezes bring in exotic scents and flavors: not the fugues and sonata forms of centuries-old musical methodologies but the clangorous improv of gamelan and raga, the roar of surf, the purr of a Sierra brook. Lou helped in stipulating those differences, along with Henry Cowell, John Cage and, a little later, Robert Erickson. They worked at a time when California also served as a temporary refuge for practitioners of the far different European outlook, and it’s an interesting irony that both Cage and Harrison, the most resolutely free-spirited of West Coast composers, studied for a time with the most resolutely rigid-spirited of visiting composers, Arnold Schoenberg. They then rejected everything he had taught them.

The fine Lou Harrison biography – by Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman, published by Oxford in 1998 – bears as its subtitle “Composing a World,” which is exactly what he did. Proof of this lies in the 73-minute-49-second compact disc slipped into the book’s back cover: bits, pieces and whole compositions culled from over 50 years of exuberant creativity. We join Harrison first at 30-something, in an all-American muscle stretcher, clearly beholden to the jagged-edge modernism of good ol’ boys Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles. Around 1941 he decides that music isn’t necessarily the polite resonances of symphony orchestras. He re-defines – for himself and for a widening circle of admirers – the very nature of musical sound. He and Cage join forces to create a whole new range of sonority by banging away on junkyard salvage: brake drums, old trolley springs, metal sheets. For entertainment as well as inspiration, he spends nights at San Francisco’s Chinese opera.

His horizons expand; he is lured into explorations of distant times and places. He rebuilds a beat-up piano to reproduce the outlines of ancient Greek tuning systems, melding these ancient harmonies into songs whose singers must first unlearn – as Harrison himself did – everything they know about the sounds of “standard” concert repertory. A New York decade (1943­53) forms an interlude, and the few quotes from Harrison’s four years as assistant music critic to Virgil Thomson at the Herald-Tribune of sad memory – peppery and marvelously observant (e.g., of Leos Janácek’s Sinfonietta: “New Jersey with peasants added”) – whet the appetite for a full volume of his writings. I knew him then, and he told me he couldn’t wait to get back to California.

The thrust of Harrison’s life, and its passions, identifies him as the embodiment of the glorious fullness, and the strangeness, of the archetypal 20th-century West Coast artist. Jovial, wise, constantly delighted and delightable, Harrison composed like none other, forging grand, eloquent music that draws upon everything there is in the world, sometimes all at once: Greek poetry, say, translated into Esperanto, sung to an ensemble of American percussionists trained to imitate the exotic, hypnotic clang of an Indonesian gamelan. His best works seemed to take the shape of bridges, but they were actually rainbows – and, now and then, indeed pretty.

Photo courtesy Opera Pacific

THE FLIMSIER THE PLOT, SO IT seems, the greater the urge to meddle. Mozart’s Abduction From the Seraglio, his first real operatic smash, plays on one of the hoariest of opera plots: maiden, captured by tyrant, rescued by heroic truelove. Left to its own devices, it can add up to an enchanted evening; a Los Angeles Opera production, not so long ago, stands as proof. The perpetrators of Opera Pacific’s production, which steamed – yes, steamed – into Orange County’s Performing Arts Center last month, obviously believed otherwise.

This version originated last year at Houston’s Cullen Theater; by an interesting coincidence, that small Houston theater was inaugurated in 1987 by the same opera. It was set that time on a Hollywood sound stage during the filming of – you guessed it – something called Abduction From the Seraglio. This time, however, the action took place on a couple of cars of the Orient Express (!!), legendary conveyance of spies, murderers, and a horny Pasha and his desirable but highly resistant latest harem captive. The production was underwritten by a round robin of American opera companies; Kansas City, Denver and Minneapolis are its next stops, an itinerary the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens might deem exotique.

Allen Moyer’s art-deco set was quite handsome, even if it did require squeezing the action onto a shallow stage, a problem that Sharyn Pirtle’s direction only partially solved. Through the train windows a moving cloudscape was visible on the back wall, giving the impression that the train was actually flying – probably a necessary step, since the act curtain’s mockup of an Orient Express railway map showed no trackage within miles of Paris, the announced destination. (Andrew Porter’s fluent English translation was obliged to absorb a carload of uncredited train references.)

To what end, this meddling? Gottlieb Stephanie’s libretto is no literary masterpiece, but it doesn’t burden the opera-goer with a tangled mass of inconsistencies and anachronisms; it reads, even in an honorable translation, the way Mozart’s music sounds. Mozart’s music did, indeed, sound quite splendid this time, thanks to the presence on the podium of Britain’s Jane Glover in her Opera Pacific debut and the company’s first-ever woman conductor. A known authority on baroque and classical style, she made her hand immediately felt as the familiar overture bubbled enchantingly. So did the entire score, in fact, with Mozart’s wind scoring blended into string tone like some idealized chamber music writ large. It was a level of Mozart orchestral performance rarely heard in oversize opera venues, even less often heard from a freelance pit band famously underrehearsed. Trains and operas do, after all, share the need for skilled conductors.

Jan Grissom was the Konstanze, bright and forthright until a few tired moments at the end of “Martern aller Arten”; Anna Christy was the Blondchen, animated sometimes to the point of chirpiness. Shawn Mathey was the clear-voiced if not exactly ardent Belmonte; American basso Kurt Link, in his company debut, was the thunderous, scene-stealing Osmin. Jeffrey Lentz, the Pedrillo, arrived on opening night weighed down with laryngitis; Chad Berlinghieri sang his music from the pit to Lentz’s miming.

AT UCLA’S SCHOENBERG HALL A FEW nights later, there was an operatic production of more modest ambitions, successfully fulfilled. I often hesitate about commenting on school opera, and then I am often surprised. I wouldn’t have automatically thought that student renditions of Maurice Ravel’s two fabulously beautiful one-act operas, L’Enfant et les Sortilèges and L’Heure Espagnole, could challenge memories of professional performances – David Hockney’s L’Enfant at the Met, for one – and, indeed, they didn’t. Yet these modest and immensely skillful recitals, staged by Vera Calábria and conducted by the L.A. Opera’s William Vendice, made for a delightful evening. The student orchestra nicely managed the rustlings of nature and the moonlight’s gleamings in L’Enfant, the tricky, hard-edged rhythms in L’Heure Espagnole. Laura Fine’s multilevel set served both operas’ needs perfectly; Ela Jo Erwin’s costumes, including a menagerie of considerable extent for L’Enfant, was endlessly inventive. Both performances were sung in clear, exceptionally well-trained French. Of the two casts, I saw the first; while it may be early in the lives of these young singers to predict happy futures, I would be happy to re-examine the comedic and vocal gifts of Jamie Chamberlin, who sang the Clockmaker’s mischievous wife in L’Heure Espagnole, anytime she passes my way.

Alberto Colla’s Le Rovine di Palmira (The Ruins of Palmyra), the 12-minute tone poem that began last week’s Philharmonic program conducted by Roberto Abbado, is the kind of piece I hoped had gone out of style by now: the short, innocuous curtain raiser that enables an orchestra to add to statistics for its noble service to contemporary music but which is gone from the memory by intermission. The sense of the piece – if that doesn’t already constitute excessive praise – is a depiction of Antar, the legendary Arabian hermit who is also celebrated in the Rimsky-Korsakov symphony that bears that name. Colla, Italian-born (1968), even includes a quote from the Rimsky work as if to legitimize his own empty-headed piece of noise pollution. He made a big point, in his pre-concert talk, about the true Arab spirit in his work, the use of exotic scales and the like. All I heard in the work was an updated hoochy-kooch, with a few wrong notes thrown in.

Better by several light-years was the afternoon’s concerto, the Mozart “Coronation,” with the young (born 1979) Italian pianist Gianluca Cascioli as soloist. Here, for once, is a new musician of genuine quality and, therefore, genuine promise. Serious of mien and of countenance, he did not flirt with the music or with the audience. He made the music as beautiful as it was meant to be, and did so with a genuine sense of what Mozart might have been about in this, the next to last of his miraculous run of piano concertos. He supplied his own cadenzas; these, too, were full of invention but never beyond the limits of Mozart’s own harmonic language. The give and take between his piano and Abbado’s properly cut-down orchestra was – as I was saying about Jane Glover’s Seraglio back there – another fine example of chamber music writ large. I note with interest but some despair that Signor Cascioli is currently studying electronic music at the Milan Conservatory. Mozart, too, needs his touch.

“CHERISH THE HYBRIDS,” LOU Harrison once told me in a radio interview. “They’re all we’ve got.” The most benevolent of all hybrid composers, Lou, 85, left us last weekend – mere days before Bill Bolcom’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, a hybrid masterpiece if ever one was, gets its first local hearing. Strange how things work out. More next week.

At the Philharmonic these weeks there have been concertos: the old standbys (Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn) hacked at by wet-behind-the-ears virtuoso wannabes, but also new stuff for new combos: works for cello, solo and multiple, under the Green Umbrella, big pieces for English horn and for massed percussion in elegant conflict with Esa-Pekka Salonen’s assembled forces. Nothing sounded like anything else; creative vitality, however, ran through them all.

Sellout and turn-away crowds have become the norm at the Green Umbrella concerts, ongoing proof that there is hope for us all. Next season‘s concerts will be in Disney, four times the capacity of Zipper Hall; what’ll you bet that they sell out, too? Even so, the intimacy at Zipper adds to the impact of these events (and of the newly relocated Piano Spheres concerts as well). I got home from the last Umbrella concert exhilarated but also physically exhausted in the best sense.

Anssi Karttunen — cellist, conductor and composer — was the soloist and, alongside Esa-Pekka, the co-star: another of these fabulous Finns who have moved onto the musical map in the last 10 or so years and provided it with a transfusion of vital fluids. Karttunen played his cello — in Pierre Boulez‘s Messagesquisse, which began the program, and in Salonen’s Mania, which ended it — with an insolence that suggests that technical difficulties, for him, simply don‘t exist. Until Salonen’s work the program was entirely for cellos, with nary a trace of the soggy old Villa-Lobos manner (as in his Bachianas Brasileiras) to blur the horizons: an ensemble of six cellos, plus Karttunen‘s solo, in the Boulez; eight in Karttunen’s reworking of the Magnus Lindberg Etude that Gloria Cheng had played at Piano Spheres last fall; eight in Luciano Berio‘s buzzing, deliriously obsessed Korot, which Karttunen conducted in its first U.S. hearing.

At the end there was Salonen’s Mania, a 17-minute concerto for cello and small orchestra, completed in 2001 but previously unperformed here; hear it on the Sony disc of Salonen‘s music, played by the London Sinfonietta with, of course, Karttunen as cellist. It’s a marvelous work that demonstrates above all the results of close sharing — of outlook or, simply, of aura — among supremely gifted musicians. I can imagine it eventually in other hands, and it certainly deserves a place in the repertory, but the glow of possession that came across on this occasion would be hard to duplicate. The music fulfills its title, but in a controlled manner mitigated by an overarching sense of humor, and with occasional visits from several of Salonen‘s household gods — Ravel most notably.

Two weeks ago there was William Kraft’s English Horn Concerto, composed for the Philharmonic‘s Carolyn Hove, a work of considerable attraction along with one major flaw. Kraft’s idea, as he explained in these pages, was to surround the soloist with small orchestral groups blended into the larger ensemble; the thinking was to spare the solo instrument‘s dusky, relatively small tone the need to compete with the full orchestra. It didn’t quite work; the overall effect was of two unmatched compositions making their way on the same stage simultaneously — the soft one constantly drowned by the loud one. What was needed — and call it heresy if you must — was some kind of amplification judiciously deployed. The material itself is attractive; I think of Kraft‘s basic Americanisms more as prototype than as stereotype. There are jazz harmonies and jazz rhythms and, of course — considering his background — some dazzling use of percussion. All told, I liked his concerto; after the thick, dark soup of Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony, which ended the program, I liked it even more. But it needs work.

Altar de Piedra (Altar of Stone) was last week‘s new music and, like the Kraft, a Philharmonic commission. Its composer, Gabriela Ortiz, was born and lives in Mexico City, and her new work — a 20-minute concerto for four percussion soloists and orchestra — underlines that information. (Another in her “Altar” series, the 1996 Altar of the Dead, has been recorded for Nonesuch by the Kronos Quartet.) Hearing it after Aaron Copland’s El Salon Mexico, which began the program, was like walking the streets of a vital, intense and joyous community after viewing a bunch of post cards. Whatever the Finns leave undone in the process of raising the musical scene out of its doldrums, our neighbors from across the border will surely complete. The Ortiz concerto is big, serious music, miles removed from Latino pop-concert cha-cha. The solo percussion group, Kroumata by name, was from Sweden, for reasons I won‘t try to explain.

The transculturation that has turned Finland’s Salonen into an advocate for the music of Mexico‘s Silvestre Revueltas is no more easily explained, nor is there need. This program’s major event was a screening of the 60-minute film called Redes (Nets), also known as The Wave, with the Revueltas score performed live under the screen. The film dates from 1935; the cinematographer was the eloquent American Paul Strand; its co-directors were Mexico‘s Emilio Gomez Muriel and the Austrian immigrant Fred Zinnemann, who, after a few years working with short films in Hollywood, would create Redes as his first feature (and move on eventually to High Noon). The film is set in a fishing village where the fishermen rebel against exploitative capitalist bosses and march toward independence. If this sounds a little like the Soviet cinematic neo-realism of the time, the look of the film — most of all Paul Strand’s haunting capturing of faces — furthers that impression. Bear in mind that the great Sergei Eisenstein had been at work in Mexico not many years before.

Revueltas‘ score is like nothing else we know from this extraordinary Mexican artist who drank himself to death at 40 — certainly nothing of the pounding euphoria in his La Noche de los Mayas that Salonen has recorded so spectacularly. There are echoes here, probably unintentional, of the weightier surges in Debussy’s La Mer. Against my better judgment, I was even dragged from time to time into thoughts of dark moments in Sibelius: the Fourth Symphony or some of the tone poems. The available print of the film is not in good shape, but its intrinsic power, plus the extraordinary richness of Revueltas‘ music as the Philharmonic played it the other day, cries out for video release.