So I've Heard

Luciano Berio was to have been among us these weeks, with his new edition of Monteverdi‘s Coronation of Poppea at the Music Center and several other performances of his music in the area planned to honor his special genius. An ongoing illness, plus injuries from a recent car crash, denied us his presence, with the Poppea not quite finished. As an attempt at recompense, the L.A. Opera dug out a short Monteverdi vocal piece that Berio had orchestrated in 1966, and used it to open a program that was otherwise mostly trash. A remarkable vocal ensemble from Stuttgart sang Berio’s spellbinding A-Ronne at the County Museum (where his marvelous Folk Songs had been performed a few weeks ago); his Korot for an ensemble of cellos lit up last week‘s Green Umbrella at Zipper Hall. On January 27 the fearless Ardittis return to LACMA with the latest in Berio’s ongoing series of solo works — this one for cello — that he calls Sequenze; another performance of Folk Songs is listed at UCLA three days later.

A-Ronne bears Berio‘s fingerprints etched with remarkable clarity. It dates from the mid-1970s, and exists in two versions: the poetry spoken, with some musical pitches suggested, by an ensemble of five actors; the poetry sung by eight singers (originally the legendary Swingle Singers, who had also created Berio’s Sinfonia in 1968). Both versions were once recorded, but don‘t hold your breath. The poem is by Edoardo Sanguinetti, the Italian mystic who has long been one of Berio’s household gods; in three brief stanzas it consists of a musing on the notions of beginning, middle and end, in quotations from many sources in many languages. Berio‘s setting, spread in fragments among his actorsingers, repeats Sanguinetti’s words something like 20 times. You have the feeling of being inside these words as they in turn seem to dance inside one another. Berio has defined the work as a “documentary” on Sanguinetti‘s poem, which is just right.

A visionary, a documentarian, a poet, a prophet . . . Berio’s strength in his great works is the way that they seem to operate from the inside, and to end up being as much about themselves as about outer stimuli. The Sequenze — available in an essential three-disc Deutsche Grammophon box — demand from each solo musician (one of whom is a singer) a kind of internal disquisition on the nature of instruments and their respective horizons. Several of his works bear generic titles: Sinfonia, Opera, Coro — and A-Ronne, which, according to Berio, means “A-to-Z” in some archaic Italian dialect — and are as much documentaries as sublime musical experiences. Opera, which was greeted with thunderous booing and a few heartfelt cheers (including my own) at its Santa Fe premiere in 1970, rams together a story about the Titanic, a couple of other plotlines, and the entire contents of an opera company‘s scenery warehouse. The exhilarating Coro demands that each of its 40 singers be seated beside each of its 40-member orchestral players; even on the recording — another essential DG disc — the richness and changing colors of these shifting sound textures cast a remarkable illumination on the hour’s worth of poetry (Sanguinetti again, and others).

At LACMA, A-Ronne was sung at top energy — in a version that drew upon both the spoken and sung editions — by six members of Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart in the first of three concerts that also included Gesualdo and Monteverdi madrigals of astounding harmonic daring, microtonal fantasies by the latter-day visionary Giacinto Scelsi that seemed to draw sustenance from this ancient music and move it upward into the atomic age, and, as the final offering, Karlheinz Stockhausen‘s 75-minute Stimmung, which, this once, didn’t quite work for me: beautifully but coldly sung, lacking in aura. There is a magical moment in this work: In a long moment of a silence so deep that you can almost taste it, one voice intones in wonderment, “Diese Stille!” This time that moment merely came and went.

The group had flown over, with help from the admirable Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes, for these three concerts and these alone. Word spread quickly, and the second and third concerts drew large crowds. (It is worth repeating that LACMA‘s concerts are free to students with ID.) The concerts, plus the Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella event built around the visit of the fabulous cellist Anssi Karttunen, and the premiere of William Kraft‘s English Horn Concerto (about which more next week), plus five days of 80-degree sunshine, made for one of those weeks when the very thought of not being in Los Angeles seemed an obscene proposition.

Berio had created his edition of Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda — rewriting the string parts for modern instruments and building out the supporting music for harpsichord — for a student performance at Juilliard in connection with an anti-war rally; in this regard, at least, it fell into place to inaugurate the L.A. Opera‘s hastily concocted substitute program for the missing Poppea. There was no staging, nor was any needed; the power of Monteverdi’s “madrigals of war” is the vividness of their vocal lines, as Monteverdi sets out to create, note by note, the whole new language of musical passion. The small ensemble under Kent Nagano splendidly re-created the flying hooves and the clash of swords. Alfredo Daza sang Tancredi‘s few lines; Kresimir Spicer’s rich, fluent tenor delivered the narration; and, above all, there was Isabel Bayrakdarian‘s Clorinda, radiant and intense. She returns to us next season, as Figaro’s Susanna; count the days.

The murk and the slime of the first measures of Massenet‘s Werther, which ensued, offered sad if not conclusive evidence of opera’s plunge in the two and a half centuries after Monteverdi. Roberto Alagna made his local debut as Werther: a somewhat talented tenor and something of a heartthrob (as in his self-indulgent if somewhat squally Cavaradossi in the recent film of Tosca); as Werther‘s ladylove Charlotte, Frederica von Stade gave a compelling demonstration of an aging singer making do, with charm and intelligence but not, alas, much voice. At the end there was Alagna again, as a punk-rock-star Otello in, thank God, only one act of Verdi’s great score. I have no space to list the wrongs of his performance (against the decent if colorless Desdemona of Carmen Giannattasio); I can only wonder what must have gone through the head of Placido Domingo, officiating on the podium, as a role that he must surely still own suffered lurid degradation in such undeserving hands.

One thing I will not do: join the procession of prognosticators whose crystal balls have already informed them, 10 months ahead of the fact, that the music in the new Disney Hall will rank among the world‘s supreme acoustical wonders. My cynicism in this regard is hard-won; memories of the sounds of inaugural gala performances at some of the world’s most afflicted concert venues — New York‘s Avery Fisher (a.k.a. Philharmonic) Hall for starters, Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth and San Francisco‘s Louise Davies — are not easily dispelled.

These gala openings had been preceded for months, maybe years, by claims that the acoustics in those halls would rival, if not surpass, the legendary sounds of Boston’s Symphony Hall or Vienna‘s Musikverein. It never happened. Vancouver and San Francisco have undergone improvements; the brash, bright sound of Davies these days is, in fact, a perfect mirror of Michael Tilson Thomas’ music making. Everybody knows that, even after several highly publicized remakes, however, the only salvation for Avery Fisher Hall lies in the wrecker‘s ball liberally administered. Meanwhile, the news recently emerged that the owners of Pasadena’s Ambassador Auditorium, by far the most acoustically admirable of local performing-arts structures, have given up on trying to sell the hall, and have decided to demolish it. One more irony, while we‘re at it: The Philadelphia Orchestra’s new Kimmel Center, which opened last year to uniformly disastrous reviews, came to further grief a few weeks ago when the sprinkler system suddenly came on in the middle of a rehearsal, ruining priceless instruments, including two $80,000 Steinways, and adding to a yearlong saga of unremitting woe.

These were the cautionary tales that went through my head during a recent hardhat tour of Disney — not my first, but the first in which it was finally possible to make out shapes. The hall itself — the “RalphsFood 4 Less Auditorium,” it will say in modest lettering on the door handles — is close enough to completion that you can sense the intimacy of the place as compared to the Chandler Pavilion. It‘s not only a matter of smaller size; it’s the contour of the room that seems to wrap itself around you. The seats hadn‘t been installed, and people hadn’t been installed in them, so there was no point in reporting on the acoustics, even if I wanted to. The size and shape of the hall — with no proscenium, the orchestra thrust out toward the audience, which is seated in the round — may remind you of Berlin‘s Philharmonie, another acoustically superb hall. Before you take that as any kind of promissory note, however, be aware that Boston’s Symphony Hall and New York‘s Avery Fisher — at opposite ends of the excellence scale — are also alike in shape and size.

The space in the auditorium is agreeably small; at this juncture, however, the space around that one room may be the most exciting aspect of the whole project. What Frank Gehry has accomplished here, with a fair amount of prodding from, among others, the late Lily Disney, is to create a marvelous continuity of indoors and out. Mrs. Disney insisted on the allotment of surrounding space for plantings, formal gardens and outdoor amenities. Her spirit is also honored in the way the approach to the main entrance joins the lobby itself to form a single unbroken concourse. Contemporary performing-arts architecture tends to create fortresses; the three buildings at the traditional Music Center are fortresses (even surrounded by moats), perched high above the Grand Avenue foot traffic and, thus, aloof from anything else in the city. Davies Hall is a fortress; so is Ambassador. Disney Hall isn’t; it joins with MOCA and with the new cathedral in giving people in the neighborhood — from the courthouses and the office buildings — someplace to walk to. Gehry‘s stainless steel and concrete are dandy, of course, but my favorite part of Disney Hall’s exterior is the glass — the windows at street level where pedestrians (including students from the Colburn School across Grand Avenue) can look in on practicing musicians and on audiences milling and tilting elbows at intermissions.

All this visual blandishment could do much to dispel talk about music‘s elitism — maybe even more than the Philharmonic’s own rather self-conscious inclusion of jazz and world music among the Beethoven symphonies and Esa-Pekka‘s tone rows. The greatest benefit the new hall can provide in the long run — after the first year, when every concert will probably sell out, until everybody has been there at least once — is this smooth flow between inside and outside. It builds upon the intimacy in the hall itself, which comes in large measure from the absence of a proscenium. It draws people in from the city itself, gives them a place to hang out and to feel a closeness to music that might have eluded them before. Whatever its other failures, New York’s Lincoln Center has always served that purpose handsomely (and London‘s South Bank best of all). The Music Center space has been a flop in this respect: poorly lit, with the outsize fountain and its absurd sculpture taking up space where the public could have been served with better food or — dream on! — a properly stocked book-and-music store.

Granted, Lincoln Center draws upon a continual flow of foot traffic along Broadway; its lit-up buildings around a sexy fountain form a lure for passersby to visit and even loiter. Downtown Los Angeles cannot compete in the matter of foot-traffic density, and it’s late in the game to argue that the Music Center should have been built somewhere else — Westwood, say, or Santa Monica — from the start. Plans have been broached to turn Grand Avenue into a broad promenade for the arts, extending from the cathedral to MOCA and to California Plaza. If this pie in the sky should actually land, Mrs. Disney‘s wonderful gardens and the outdoor performing spaces and the cafes and restaurants could — in your lifetime, if not necessarily in mine — become a “music center” in more than just name.

You want to know the history of L.A.‘s music? Ask the history makers themselves, best of all the three surviving geezers who’ve been here, done that and keep it up. David Raksin, 90 last year, came to Hollywood in 1935 to create movie music for Charles Chaplin; his later triumphs include the slithery title tune from Laura. Also in 1935, Leonard Stein, now 86, began studies with Arnold Schoenberg, became his assistant, edited his writings, headed the Schoenberg Institute until its shotgun divorce from USC and now masterminds the adventurous Piano Spheres concerts. William Kraft, the junior member of this senior triumvirate, turns 80 this year and has probably worn the most hats: percussionist (including a stint as the Los Angeles Philharmonic‘s principal timpanist), composer, conductor and teacher. This weekend’s Philharmonic program includes the world premiere of Kraft‘s Concerto for English Horn and Orchestra, one of a series of solo vehicles commissioned by the orchestra for its first-desk players. Next month (February 7 and 9) comes another world premiere, Kraft’s first-ever opera, Red Azalea, commissioned and produced by UC Santa Barbara‘s Opera Theater.

Neither work is what you’d automatically expect from a composer best remembered as a percussionist, banging his way to fame on the glorious array of hardware that constitutes the most watchable part of a symphony orchestra. The English horn is, after all, an instrument most known for lustrous, somewhat mournful melodic lines; an opera calls for the same kind of music, produced by human throats. In his spacious ranch house tucked up against Mount Wilson, the smiling, Teletubby-shaped Kraft has easy explanations for his recent compositional byways. A concerto for English horn? “Well, I‘ve written for everything else.” An opera? “It’s the only thing I haven‘t done.”

Actually, the concerto has a touch of percussion in its ancestry. Philharmonic percussionist Raynor Carroll came back from a trip to Thailand and Indonesia a few years ago with a marvelous collection of exotic kitchenware that included several dozen tuned gongs. That inspired Kraft to compose the “garrulous but endearing” (Rich, L.A. Weekly), dauntingly named Encounters XI: The Demise of Suriyodhaya for Carolyn Hove’s English horn and Carroll‘s gongs and gadgetry; it was played at a Green Umbrella concert in March 1999. The new concerto, which runs something like 30 minutes, doesn’t really crib from the earlier piece (“except in one or two tiny places,” says Kraft), but the spirit abides. “I‘ve subtitled it ‘The Great Encounter,‘ and I suppose that does relate to the earlier title.”

Most of the orchestra is seated upstage. Down in front there are three smaller groups: solo violin and cello, alto flute and guitar, harp and percussion (chimes, crotales, cymbals, drums, gongs gongs gongs and down the alphabet to vibes). Soloist Hove moves across the stage, “visiting” each small group in turn. The groups hand off their music to one another and to the orchestra. The texture — solo alternating with small ensemble alternating with full orchestra — may remind you of the concerti grossi of Handel’s time, which, says Kraft, is part of the plan.

The opera sets Anchee Min‘s award-winning autobiographical account of her life in China in the final years of Mao’s “cultural revolution”; Christopher Hawes created the libretto. The work calls for a six-member vocal ensemble, eight players on Western instruments plus an erhu, that silky-toned two-string Chinese fiddle you hear a lot in Tan Dun‘s music. “The real story,” says Kraft, “is about an artist learning to get in touch with her inner conflicts. My wife, Joanie [composer Joan Huang], knew the ——–
AUTHOR when they were growing up in China. When I first got the book, she got all excited and decided that she wanted to do her own opera. Wouldn’t that be something: husband and wife composing his-and-her operas on the same story? As it happened, Joanie dropped her plan; too busy.”

“Composing was always the center of my ambition,” Kraft remembers, “but there was always the problem of making a living.” Chicago-born, he immigrated to New York in the 1940s, studied composition at Columbia and percussion — with the New York Philharmonic‘s legendary Saul Goodman — at Juilliard. “I guess I had gotten into percussion first. But then I had my first epiphany. I had seen a movie — The Maltese Falcon with Bogart and all those good people. I was walking home when it suddenly hit me: The main reason I’d been so overwhelmed by that movie was the music. Something about that score — by Adolph Deutsch, who wasn‘t all that well-known — hit upon the exact nature of that film, jazzy and tragic, dark and humorous. From that moment, I became aware of music’s real power over a listener‘s imagination, as I hadn’t been aware before. From then on, I knew I could never be satisfied just pounding on things.”

As epiphanies go, this one was unusually well-timed. Serious composition for percussion had become respectable since the 1930s, with Edgard Varese‘s Ionisation and the Constructions of John Cage and Lou Harrison. Even so, Kraft spent some time wrestling with the beast. He had come to Los Angeles in 1955, when there was plenty of work for a freelance percussionist. (If you have The Soldier’s Tale from Sony Classics‘ big box of Stravinsky conducting Stravinsky, that’s Bill Kraft, in 1961, on the final rat-a-tat boom-boom.) He joined the Philharmonic‘s roster of percussionists. “It was Alfred Wallenstein’s last year as conductor, and the orchestra went to Asia on tour. We got to Thailand, Korea, Indonesia, and I heard all those drums and gongs in their native settings and had another epiphany. Either I had to start composing, I decided, or I had to get out of music altogether.”

He started composing — pure percussion stuff like the 1956 Theme and Variations and several percussion-plus-orchestra pieces of considerable extent; instrumental and vocal music, including an impressive series of settings of the Pierrot Lunaire poems that Schoenberg hadn‘t touched; The Sky’s the Limit, an electronicacoustic computerized installation for Chicago‘s O’Hare Airport; songs, chamber works and — finally — an opera.

Where, in these tightrope-walking times for any music that wants to be taken seriously or, at least, as “serious,” does Bill Kraft locate himself?

“I think that composers of my generation have wasted 10 to 15 years of our lives in trying to keep up with all the important issues from Europe. Whatever happened in Europe we felt we had to know about and had to practice. We had to show that we knew what was going on in the world. Consequently, we lost ourselves in that process and forgot who we were.”

And where does he locate himself on the American map? “There is no such thing as one American tradition, there are many. Everybody has his own approach. So it occurred to me: If we‘re going to compose, why not be ourselves? That makes a bigger problem for us. I think it was Mort Subotnick who said, ‘The difference between a European composer and an American composer is that the European knows where he is in history.‘ We don’t. I had thought more and more about applying it to my own output and to my teaching. It behooves us to find out who we are. My background was originally jazz. In my teens, I played a lot of jazz. I played in the rhythm section, either piano or drums. Therefore, I found that I can‘t get away from pulse. The music isn’t alive to me if it doesn‘t have pulse.

”If there’s anything that‘s basic to my idea of composing music, it’s just loving to compose. I‘ve never had any intention of doing something for the first time, or breaking ground with anything in particular. It’s just to do what comes natural. I do have a great concern for idiom. In whatever piece I‘m writing, I’m very concerned what that piece is about. If it‘s a piece for an instrument, then I do every bit of investigation I can to see what that instrument is about. The piece ends up being for that instrument and no other instrument. In other words, there’s no universal style or concept I have that is applied to all of my music. Instead it grows out of the particulars of a given piece.“

No two works of Hector Berlioz are in any way alike; nothing from his pen resembles anyone else‘s music. Mention of Berlioz brings on images of diabolical incantations, rattling of dry bones, and opium-induced nightmares; how, then, explain the deep, soft musical discourse of his oratorio L’Enfance du Christ, given so exquisitely by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic forces here the week before Christmas? Even to his French compatriots — in his time, and in ours as well — Berlioz has always been the most unclassifiable of composers. His fame was secure in Germany, England, even Russia, long before Parisian audiences learned to sit still during his music. In Paris, in 1952, I attended a series of lectures on the history of French music, by the formidable teacher Nadia Boulanger, mother superior to generations of composers of all nationalities. From her eloquent evangelism I gleaned notable insights into the music of Rameau, Faure, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky (!), Milhaud; not once, however, did the name of Berlioz pass her lips.

Turn the clock back, to Paris in the 1820s. (Berlioz‘s Memoirs, collected and edited by David Cairns, sets the stage eloquently.) At age 24, driven by passions he had not yet learned to control or even to name, Berlioz shares in the mass astonishment of Parisians as — thunderclap after thunderclap — the city experiences its first full Shakespearean immersion with a British company ensconced for a season at the Odeon; the publication of its first French translation of Faust; its first hearings of the Beethoven symphonies, led by the ardent if undertalented Francois-Antoine Habeneck. At all events, one familiar sight is the fiery young Berlioz, screaming out imprecations to performers, surmounted by an unruly reddish-brown thatch against which the finest barbering has been of no avail. Berlioz gains the friendship of the even younger Franz Liszt; the two sit up night after night discussing Shakespeare, Goethe and Beethoven. Berlioz swoons under the spell of the visiting Ophelia, the Irish enchantress Harriet Smithson, and works it off by composing the Symphonie Fantastique, which earns him his first notice by the finicky Parisian public.

This year marks the bicentennial of Berlioz’s birth. The rest of the Philharmonic‘s observance doesn’t take place until early 2004, since the orchestra has all that fancy new programming to usher it into its new abode in the last weeks of 2003. Major celebrations are scheduled all over, however; the Met has a new production of Les Troyens in the works; the San Francisco Opera plans a staging of La Damnation de Faust. (Yes, I know it‘s a cantata, not a stage work, but if you want to see a really stunning if off-the-wall DamFaust staging, check out the DVD from the 1999 Salzburg Festival, on the ArtHaus label, with a Mephistopheles from Willard White that’ll curl your toes.)

The most obvious reasons for his music‘s uniqueness have to do with its sound: the four huge bands of brass and percussion that converge for the “Tuba mirum” of the Requiem; the brass, winds and gibberish-shouting chorus as Faust and his tormentors fall into the Infernal flames; the howling of winds and unseen demons as the storm overtakes Dido and Aeneas in Les Troyens and causes them to fall in love. Equally amazing are the small sounds, sometimes at the far end of audibility: the radiant “Alleluia” and the concluding “Amen” sung offstage in L’Enfance du Christ; the astonishing merging of high flutes and low trombones — with three octaves of emptiness in between that stand for a vision of Eternity — again in the Requiem; the amazing moment in the Fantastique as woodwind-playing shepherds serenade one another from distant hilltops while four timpani harmonize in menacing, soft thunder.

Paris‘ most beloved music in Berlioz’s time was nothing like any of this. Audiences who had taken slowly to the shock waves of the “Eroica” were even more reluctant to deal with the shaggy-haired new upstart. What they flocked to, instead, were the blocky orchestrations and harmonies of Luigi Cherubini‘s resolutely academic grand operas, and of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s even emptier lyrico-historico spectacles, the spaghetti Westerns of their day. This was the crowd-pleasing fare that filled seats at the Paris Opera, while Berlioz wept as his grander, far more deserving scores went a-begging — the stunning Les Troyens that has only now come into circulation, the magnificent but still-neglected Benvenuto Cellini from which only the “Roman Carnival” Overture has gained any attention.

The Berlioz harmonies, too, are like nobody else‘s. The guitar was the only instrument he truly mastered; the familiar image of a composer at a piano, working out inspirations in full, four-part harmony, doesn’t apply here. His chords often have one or two notes missing, and this produces an interesting earthiness; listen to the mountaineer‘s song in Harold in Italy. Above all, however, the wonder of Berlioz’s art lies in that supreme command of the ardent, heart-rending, long melody: Romeo‘s soliloquy in the Romeo et Juliette Symphony, the merging of that tune into the Capulets’ party music and then — wonder of wonders! — the sublimity of what ensues, as the lovers meet each other among Verona‘s dark shadows. (Find the GiuliniChicago Symphony recording if you can.)

Similar marvels form the essence of the Christmas music three weeks ago that began our Berlioz observance. L’Enfance du Christ is one of Berlioz‘s smaller miracles — smaller, that is, in terms of the reduced orchestra and the disarming simplicity of much of the music. Berlioz’s text tells of the Holy Family‘s escape from Herod’s massacre and its flight to Egypt. He tells it as a folktale in simple, quasi-peasant language, similar to what John Adams and Peter Sellars have created with the same dramatic context in their El Niño, due here in March. Wonderful, quiet, disturbing music, it seems lit through candlelight and stained glass. A rich, earthy harmonic sense suffuses the entire work: the familiar (and weepily beautiful) Shepherds‘ Chorus, Mary’s Lullaby, even the charming, throwaway chamber music for flutes and harp.

The performance under Salonen was full of love and reverence, although I might have wished for a smaller contingent of Master Chorale members to match the somewhat cut-back orchestra. The solo group couldn‘t have been better: Vinson Cole’s slightly reedy (and therefore very French-sounding) narration, Susanne Mentzer‘s adoring singing as Mary, and — a newcomer, at least to me — the excellent French-Swiss baritone Gilles Cachemaille in diametrically opposite roles as the evil Herod and the Ishmaelite father who offers the Holy Family shelter, and whose few lines in the latter role might just be the world’s most comforting music.

Yefim Bronfman’s piano recital two weeks ago at the Music Center was everything such an event needs to be: fluff and substance, novelty and familiarity carefully compounded, played with awesome technique and admirable wisdom. As piano recitals go, it lacked the giddy adventure of Vicki Ray‘s Piano Spheres performance last month, but that whole remarkable series is a set of one-of-a-kind events, on a rarefied plateau where nary a note of Rachmaninoff can intrude. Seven Rachmaninoff Preludes on Bronfman’s program may have been one or two too many — although they didn‘t, at least, include the wretched item in C-sharp minor — but the set had its gooey charms. Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata, music composed to be greeted with ooohs and aaahs, did so once again. Esa-Pekka Salonen‘s Dichotomie, which Gloria Cheng introduced two years ago, again generated its quotient of airy delight, nicely spangled with echoes of Ravel’s side-slipping harmonies along the way. The final encore, Chopin‘s obligatory ”Revolutionary“ Etude, sent the crowd home happy if unsurprised.

Beethoven’s D-major Sonata (Opus 10 No. 3) was the program‘s earliest work and, in many ways, the most daring. Three of its movements are reasonably predictable: the young (28) Beethoven roistering along the keyboard, pulling his by-then-famous lively rhythmic tricks and harmonic jolts. By 1798 he had found his place in Vienna’s musical society; his sonatas and chamber pieces were grabbed by eager publishers and were on everybody‘s best-sellers lists. Still, something takes place in this sonata — most of all in its slow movement — that sounds a new note in Beethoven’s musical language. The music still counts as ”early“ Beethoven, but this slow movement makes it later than you‘d think.

The movement is in D minor, which was for Beethoven a key of storms and sorrows. In 1795 he had played Mozart’s D-minor Piano Concerto (K. 466) at a concert arranged by Mozart‘s widow, and had been stirred by the music to create a long and complex cadenza, which has survived. (Mitsuko Uchida plays it on her Philips recording of the concerto.) My guess is that Mozart’s edgy, fist-shaking music taught Beethoven something about the expressive power of D minor. The slow movement of this sonata — and the slow movement of the first of the Opus 18 string quartets that followed a couple of years later, the Piano Sonata that bears the subtitle ”Tempest“ and then, finally, the Ninth Symphony, all in D minor — shares something of this stark, tragic sense, defiant at times but mournfully accepting at other times.

The slow movement of Opus 10 No. 3 starts off dank and chill; then there are outcries. A new tune seems more settled at first; it rides comfortably over arpeggios in the left hand. But the quietude doesn‘t last; the right hand moves up the scale in small fragments until, at the top, it shatters and screams for help in all but words. (That’s one of Beethoven‘s D-minor tricks, a lapsing into nonverbal recitative; it happens in the ”Tempest“ Sonata and, of course, in the Ninth.) The music grows darker; the opening chill returns, this time over a dense underbrush of piano figuration; a final sigh, and it ends. Every scholar measures Beethoven’s trajectory as a composer by certain landmarks: the ”Eroica,“ the last string quartets, the Ninth. This movement, I submit, belongs on that list. Certainly Bronfman‘s playing of the music seemed moved by that awareness.

The world does not languish for lack of Beethoven’s piano sonatas on disc. Alfred Brendel alone has produced three complete sets; my latest Schwann lists over a dozen boxed sets of all 32 sonatas, and then goes on to 14 columns of teensy print listing single discs. Despite this impractical glut, the great news is that the first-ever set of the complete Beethoven sonatas, made by Artur Schnabel in London in the early 1930s, is being reissued on low-cost CDs on Naxos. Two discs are out so far. The rich mellowness of Schnabel‘s beloved Bechstein, amazing even back in the days of the scratchy 78s, is amazing once again thanks to the miraculous audio restoration of Mark Obert-Thorn. At times like this, the self-destructive side of the record industry — drowning in its own glut — suddenly doesn’t matter.

Schnabel was what used to be called a ”musician‘s musician“; there are passing moments on these recordings when fingers weaken and musical lines go momentarily dim — especially in the murderous final fugue of the ”Hammerklavier“ Sonata and in the ”Diabelli“ Variations, which neither you nor I could play any better. Schnabel used to define his artistic preferences as a taste for music ”that was better than it could be performed“: Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert (whose sonatas he rescued from near oblivion), no Hungarian Rhapsodies, no Rachmaninoff. Even on this first disc, which contains the three sonatas of the very early Opus 2, Schnabel’s mastery is clear: the furious final movement of Opus 2 No. 1, the slow movement of Opus 2 No. 3 with its astounding Schubertian foreshadowings.

Schnabel‘s greatness was his ability to re-create music whole: not a good tune floating atop less-important left-hand figuration, but a caring for every line of the most complicated music. His playing of the aforementioned slow movement of Opus 10 No. 3, which will probably turn up on the third disc of the new Naxos series, is one of those indescribable performances that simply holds you motionless for something like an eternity. (Schnabel’s ”eternity,“ by the way, times out at 11‘46”. Compare that to Brendel’s 7‘31“ in his 1973 set and 10’28” in 1995 to realize how Beethoven‘s music remains a living, changing organism in the ears of performers and listeners alike.)

I am old enough to have seen Schnabel perform — including once from a stage seat in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, close enough to note that the twinkle in the cheeky modulations in a Schubert sonata were exactly mirrored in the twinkle on his own countenance. Hearing him perform Beethoven — on these new CDs, or on my treasured LPs in the EMI box that also contains Eric Blom‘s marvelous program from 1932 that accompanied the original 78s and which Naxos should seriously consider reprinting — I hear a depth in the music’s textures that no other pianist in my experience has been able to match. For their content of wisdom mingled with moments of reckless energy, I will also hold on to my Brendels (all three sets); for clarity and elegant balance, I will retain Richard Goode‘s splendid Nonesuch versions. But the re-emergence of Schnabel casts a shadow over even those deserving ventures. I envy the generations of musicians and music lovers hearing his treasurable artistry for the first time.

“THIS PERFORMING VERSION, conceived by Marta Domingo,” reads a program note for the Los Angeles Opera’s current Tales of Hoffmann, “is based on Michael Kaye’s variorum edition of the opera.” That may be so, in Mama Domingo’s creative imagination. But when Michael Kaye’s new version of Offenbach’s enduring fantasy opera was staged by the L.A. Opera in 1988, the amendments to the traditional, inauthentic Hoffmann included the restoration of a long episode that ended the Giulietta scene in something of a bloodbath. From earlier in that scene, too, Kaye had eliminated the “Diamond” aria and the sextet-plus-chorus, since they were the work of other hands, stuck onto the opera after Offenbach’s death. Kaye replaced the spurious sung recitatives with the original spoken dialogue. He restored Offenbach’s pristine ordering of the events, with the Giulietta scene following, not preceding, the Antonia scene. Not one of these new editorial findings is observed in the Hoffmann currently on view (through December 21).

In 1988 there was Frank Corsaro’s lively staging of the Kaye edition, with Papa Domingo in the title role, Rodney Gilfry as the four villains and Julia Migenes as the four great loves of Hoffmann’s thwarted quests. It made of Hoffmann a creation far stronger – both dramatically and musically – than the familiar versions then in circulation. You can check this out for yourself in the Philips recording of the Michael Kaye edition, conducted by Jeffrey Tate, although Neil Shicoff’s pallid Hoffmann is not exactly an enhancement. Since the Los Angeles Opera has already proved the superiority of the Kaye edition, it seems incomprehensible that Mrs. Domingo would take it upon herself to lead the opera back to its bad old ways.

Otherwise – and that’s a pretty big “otherwise” – the current Hoffmann has its modest attractions. Marcus Haddock is the Hoffmann: a Neil Shicoff plus brains, you might say, capable of a nice lyric line delivered in a voice reedy but not unpleasant. Samuel Ramey does the villains as if to the manner born, splendidly ghastly as the evil Dr. Miracle pursuing the hapless Antonia with his armload of charms. Sumi Jo’s grossly overdirected Olympia brings down the house with her big laff numbers; the Giulietta, Milena Kitic, is barely there. The Antonia of Andrea Rost is, by some distance, the most artistically conscientious work of the evening. Emmanuel Villaume is the conductor; Giovanni Agostinucci, the designer; three days after seeing the opera, I cannot remember a single feature of their work.

THERE WAS ONCE AN AIRLINE – NOW defunct, I think – that advertised its service on the strength of sexier apparel for its attendants; the Philharmonic’s “casual Fridays” reminds me of this. The gimmick is that the players get to dress like people rather than penguins, and make themselves available afterward for close encounters downstairs at Otto’s. The programs on those nights are also shorter, which tells me something about management’s attitude toward musical content that I’d rather not think about.

On a recent Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, at least half the players wore dark-blue shirts (as
did I) so that the dress (or undress) code was merely a matter of substituting one uniform for another. The other concerts that weekend listed two Respighi “Roman” tone poems; on Friday we were allotted only one, which would have been a mercy even if we had all shown up in togas. (Roman Festivals is my choice of the week for world’s worst music, barely edging out John Williams’ Harry Potter score.) Miguel Harth-Bedoya, the Philharmonic’s immensely talented associate conductor, began the program with Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, with each of the four concertos performed by a different member of the orchestra’s string section, an amusing and workable notion. Each of the four soloists – Michele Bovyer, Akiko Tarumoto, Stacy Wetzel and Jonathan Wei – played with a different take on what Baroque fiddling is supposed to sound like 300 years after the fact. If I had to hand out a prize, it would go to Mr. Wei, who turned the final concerto into a wild – if not very Vivaldian – winter carnival.

Last week at the Philharmonic there was more spellbinding, this time by the barely-out-of-his-teens pianistic whiz Lang Lang, who dealt with Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto exactly as the music deserved. I have long, long been of the opinion that Nicholas Rubinstein’s famous condemnation of the work at first hearing only came about because Tchaikovsky had played it for him straight. In merely correct performances the music is as bad as Rubinstein proclaimed – shapeless, clumsy and dull. Played as it was by the angel-faced Lang – his visage turned skyward as if receiving supernal dictation from Above, his 40 or so fingers clattering through those absurd cascading octaves like some interplanetary juggernaut, with the looks of blank astonishment as conductor Zubin Mehta struggled to keep up not always successfully – the work simply eludes capture by rational criticism. It is what it is. And as long as crowds leap to their collective feet and roar their collective approval, it probably doesn’t matter all that much that the Tchaikovsky Concerto is, at heart, a gruesome betrayal of the high art that Tchaikovsky unmistakably aspired to – and often achieved elsewhere in his legacy.

So far Lang Lang has ridden skyward on the glitter-junk repertory: this concerto and Rach 3, Mussorgsky’s Pictures and Lang’s own socko version of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” which he played as his second encore. His first encore, the Liszt transcription of Schumann’s Widmung, was distorted almost all the way to parody. At his pre-concert talk last week he trotted out all the clichés that press agents compose for their clients. (Am I alone in having my teeth ache at the sound of “very very” – even from Lang Lang?) If this is where his career is taking him, I suppose he deserves congratulation for all the gold that lies ahead. It’s still sad, however, to think of all those fingers going to waste.

Funny . . . as I write this I also start thinking about Zubin Mehta, for whom the crowds also roared far too early in his career, with results audible in last week’s threadbare reading of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Orpheus, one of Liszt’s less significant symphonic poems. Mehta takes his bow these days with a kind of insolent glower; on the podium he looks half asleep; surely this was the cause of the poor balances and muffed entrances in the Bartók, one of the canniest pieces of orchestral writing the repertory possesses. I see he’s down for the Beethoven Ninth at Disney Hall next season; it’s probably not too early to head for the hills.

I was accosted at a recent concert by a well-dressed chap of a certain age. My mission, he informed me, was to throw the weight of my words behind his campaign to convince the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s management that the Gothic Symphony of Havergal Brian was, out of all the world‘s fund of musical masterpieces, the only worthy choice to inaugurate the new Disney Concert Hall. I thanked him and went on my way. Three days later the mails produced a lengthy screed from this same gentleman, reminding me of my solemn duty and declaiming his praise of Havergal Brian in terms worthy of the work itself — some two hours of grandiose foofaraw for orchestra, vocal soloists, choruses, brass band and, for all I know, an offstage choir of vacuum cleaners.

My correspondent had already exercised his powers of persuasion on the Philharmonic’s Deborah Borda, who replied that the work in question was nothing but “third-rate Elgar.” That might just be unduly unkind to Sir Edward, or perhaps a little overkind to our Havergal — who, by the way, died in 1972 at the age of 96, with 32 symphonies in the can. (All 32, by the way, are due for a new recording series on, wouldn‘t ya know, Naxos.) To rescue you from the suspense this account of mine must surely cause, let me assure you that at last week’s press conference announcing the Philharmonic‘s plans for its first season in its new hall, the name of Havergal Brian was once more — as usual — among the missing. We’ll get back to what was not missing in a paragraph or two.

The annals teem with the names of artists of modest expressive qualities but a certain talent to simulate expressivity with crudely attractive paraphernalia: the musical equivalent, perhaps, of paint-by-the-numbers. Russia‘s Nikolai Medtner was one; his perfunctory note spinning earned the adoration (and cash) of an Indian maharajah. The most prolific practitioners of the mellifluous nonentity are the Brits: eminent Victorians, eloquent Edwardians, some of recent origin. (Heard any Robert Simpson lately?) Their music seems to echo the wrenching groan of English church organs, although the textures also owe something to last week’s Yorkshire pudding re-warmed. They tend to compose symphonies, bushels of symphonies. They are the inherited burden that today‘s splendid young firebrands — Thomas Ades, Mark Turnage, those guys — must live down. They do, however, inspire wild adulation. In my indispensable copy of Don Marquis’ archy and mehitabel, the cockroach archy queries a moth on why it is so fond of flying into flames. “i think he‘s nuts,” says archy, “but i wish there was something in this world i wanted as much as that moth wants to fry.”

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Philharmonic’s announcement of its inaugural season in Disney Hall is worthy itself of orchestration for brass choirs, etc. The program is, for starters, a diplomatic masterwork, a fantastic interweave of the many ways to capture and hold an audience. Considering the fact that audiences would flock to the new hall (for the first season, anyhow) even if the programming were nothing but Nutcrackers and Messiah sing-alongs, there is a high level of courage in this planning: world premieres galore, a Green Umbrella series loaded with true grit, a grand celebration of Berlioz — who is not everybody‘s favorite Romantic, but whose Symphonie Fantastique will soar this time. The adventurous Green Umbrella concerts are in the big hall, by the way, not across the street at Zipper. That, with the lure of the new hall itself, just might widen a few horizons among the new listeners. There’s an interesting series called “First Nights,” which will present music that infuriated the critics at first — The Rite of Spring, for example — along with discussions as to why this happened.

There are labels and titles all over the place, in fact; somebody at the Philharmonic knows a thing or two about promotion. There‘s a “Creation Festival,” which obviously includes works of that name by Haydn and Milhaud but also new works by Magnus Lindberg and Liza Lim. Mahler’s Second Symphony turns up, as we all knew it would, and that work, too, has been subsumed under the “Creation” rubric.

In another sense, however, the whole season‘s outline gives off a creative aura. It was somebody’s smart idea, for example, to thread through the programs a collection of pieces about building: Morton Feldman‘s Rothko Chapel, Liza Lim’s Ecstatic Architecture, and two works, Yannis Xenakis‘ Metastaseis and Edgard Varese’s Poeme Electronique, both written specifically to mingle sounds and architectural shapes. Two series demonstrate an admirable awareness of the world outside Frank Gehry‘s shiny walls: “Sounds About Town” and “InsideOutside”; both have to do with collaborations with other music in the neighborhood — including an admirable bow to the jazz scene — and with other organizations that fight the same fights: the Getty, for example, and the enterprising Crossroads School.

I note some interesting interweaves. Michael Tilson Thomas guest-conducts the Philharmonic for the first time since 1985, when, after a series of really bratty, self-indulgent performances, Ernest Fleischmann gave him the boot. Franz Welser-Most also has a program. In both cases, Esa-Pekka Salonen will return the visit, as guest on both the San Francisco and Cleveland podiums. (Cleveland, it’s no secret, once actively wooed Salonen for the post Welser-Most now occupies.) Simon Rattle returns, this time with his own Berlin Philharmonic, to the venue where he began his ascent to international stardom. Christoph von Dohnanyi is down for a guest shot; Lorin Maazel arrives with his New York Philharmonic. That gives us a look at the Cleveland Orchestra‘s three most recent conductors; wouldn’t you trade them all for one week with George Szell?

It‘s a thrilling, exhilarating list, masterful in its counterpoint of high adventure and “something for everybody.” Can’t you just taste Alfred Brendel and Matthias Goerne at work on Schubert‘s Die Winterreise? The Berlioz Fantastique re-created with the complicity of Britain’s Theatre de Complicite? (Remember its Shostakovich at UCLA last year?) A new work — a chamber opera, no less — by the fabulously gifted Osvaldo Golijov, still riding high after this season‘s Pasion? Monteverdi’s Vespers, with his baroque brass racketing through the new, shiny spaces? Okay, master builders: It‘s your baby now, and a healthy one so far.