So I've Heard

It was wise local politics, if less wise music making, for the Master Chorale to deliver the first official (i.e., ticket-selling) concert at the new cathedral. It suggested the outline of a cultural enclave downtown, from the cathedral at the north end to Disney Hall at the south. Now that the map has been drawn, however, the better part of wisdom would be to destroy it.

As a place for music making, the new edifice is something of a disaster: a revelation all the more tragic measured against the high performance level of the inaugural program planned and executed by Grant Gershon and his excellent band of singers — at least as much of it as could be heard through the susurrus of the ventilating equipment and the harsh, dry acoustics of the space that actually seemed to suck resonance from both singers and organ. My guess is that it never occurred to the designers that there might be a time when a proper concert atmosphere — i.e., a background of silence — might be required in that vast space; under normal churchlike circumstances all that mechanical noise could conceivably stand in for the whispers of God and His angels. It was, however, an audible and highly unwelcome presence at this event.

The program was intelligently chosen, further evidence of Gershon’s status as a thinking man‘s musician: small works by Arvo Part, Henryk Gorecki and Francis Poulenc, plus just enough post-romantic organ trash to titillate admirers of that stuff and keep the rest of us from throwing up in the aisles. It took no more than a single movement from Leo Sowerby’s Organ Symphony thundered forth by the cathedral‘s own organist Samuel Soria — slithering, dense, aimless music, marked “fast and sinister” — to epitomize everything that is hateful about that awful repertory. (Fortunately, there was other music a week later to restore the digestive tract and the soul — a splendid Historic Sites vocal-cum-organ concert of Renaissance music by Dana Marsh’s new Musica Humana Oxford, with a superior instrument in the more congenial setting of the First Congregational Church.)

Last week‘s XTET concert at the County Museum sent me out into the streets, deliriously seized in a 68 pulsation from the evening’s final music, wanting it never to leave my head. The music: the last of Luciano Berio‘s Folk Songs, the portfolio of 11 tunes from all over, collected and marvelously rejiggered by the composer for his blithe-spirit wife, the late Cathy Berberian. Something about these small, perfect jewels goes beyond easy description; most of the tunes are familiar (“Black Is the Colour,” two songs from Canteloube’s Auvergne collection, etc.), but Berio‘s new seasonings endow them with magical glints. Cathy recorded these songs, inimitably. She has left us, but her specialness informs whoever else can sing the whole set properly. That includes Daisietta Kim, who is supposed to have retired from singing but who keeps returning to shine special lights with the XTET forces (who, on this occasion, actually numbered XIII).

The group was formed in 1985, out of that pool of freelancers (studios by day, real music at night) that is one of this area’s great strengths. This season they have a three-concert residency at LACMA (next, February 10). Their programming is fearless and serendipitous, which means that there can be clinkers. Two nowhere pieces by Mary Ellen Childs and Christina Viola Oorebeek fell into that category at last week‘s concert; the Berio, and a perky and trick-laden Henry Cowell string quartet, made full amends.

Alan Feinberg, whose spirit is comparably serendipitous, drew a small but responsive audience to his piano recital at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall: a crowd mostly young, who applauded in the right places and nowhere else, and appeared to know why they were there. I could have wished for the entirety of Ives‘ “Concord” Sonata instead of the one movement (“The Alcotts,” set forth with an outpouring of warmth and humor that made you long to join those folks around their blazing home fire), but there was also other Ives to compensate. That was The Celestial Railroad, amazing music that crams into a work for solo piano the hifalutin goings-on of the orchestral works: a grab bag’s worth of found musical objects — march tunes, folk songs, a ragtime turn or two. (The music actually originated as a movement in the Fourth Symphony, which is usually performed with a couple of extra conductors to keep the events on track; imagine all that boiled down to piano-keyboard size!)

At the start there was Bach, intensely personal yet accurate renderings of some of his most appealingly strange, chromatic meanderings: small works made large (two of the Duetti, usually played on the organ but this time transformed into violent piano drama), and large works (the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue) made even larger. Strangely but successfully interspersed into the Bach group was a set of tiny preludes by the remarkable, undefinable Russian near-genius Galina Ustvolskaya. At the end there was Chopin, chill for my taste; I could have used more of the contemporary spirit as dispensed by Ives, and — in Feinberg‘s unique, personal vision — no less by Bach.

Apropos chill: At the Philharmonic last week there was bad Grieg (the first suite of Peer Gynt music; why, in God’s name?) and worse Sibelius (the Violin Concerto, luridly tarted up in Midori‘s overnuanced reading). Esa-Pekka Salonen didn’t make it in time for the downbeat; at intermission people were swapping I-10 traffic horror stories. The Grieg was led by the Philharmonic‘s assistant conductor, the excellent Yasuo Shinozaki, but this is music you or I could conduct blindfolded. Why, as long as we’re blindfolded, are there so many bad romantic concertos in D minor? Just asking.

After intermission there came Carl Nielsen‘s Fifth Symphony, and now you know why I was there. This is music from 1922, about the same time as the Ives Celestial Railroad, and in some ways equally rambunctious. The sounds of distant battle inform the work; within the orchestra there are arguments between winds and brass, or among the brass themselves, that seem to want to tear the music apart. Out front there is, of all Ivesian touches, a solo snare drum — the Philharmonic’s Perry Dreiman beating an insistent tattoo, challenging the rest of the players to join in, responding sarcastically when they refuse. At the end the ghost of Brahms, perhaps even of Mahler, sweeps across the battlefield.

Wonderful, strange music, this. Salonen spoke briefly, wittily, about the essence of the music, its conflicts and its resolutions. When he talks about music, he almost invariably makes better sense than the official pre-concert jabberwocky upstairs. Then he conducts the music, and that, too, makes sense. This was a great performance; more Nielsen, please.

Photo by J. Henry Fair

IF YO-YO MA WERE TO RE-DRAW the map of this planet, its land mass would consist of a large blob with no boundary lines. He’s a supremely gifted musician of extraordinarily broad passions, this smiling, Paris-born, Harvard-educated wizard cellist, nurtured on Bach and Beethoven. He can play their music as well as anyone else on the planet — as he has demonstrated in concerts and recitals here more than once. He has also performed sanitized hillbilly waltzes here, in cahoots with fellow Appalachians-for-a-day like Edgar Meyer and Mark O’Connor. He’s been here with a tango band to play music by Astor Piazzolla, and that was mucho snazzy. Two weeks ago he came to UCLA’s Royce Hall with an omnium gatherum of performers from points north, east, south and west, and with music of similar provenance. He calls this latest cultural dabble “The Silk Road Project,” with players in old and new repertory culled from points along that old trade route, which first brought European and Asian cultures and merchandise to within handshaking proximity. Whatever else his efforts may achieve, they have turned the old camel trail into a sleek multilane highway with Big Mac drive-ins every few miles and TV-equipped rest stops in between.

It’s possible to wish, as I surely do, that Yo-Yo Ma would turn up here more often to play Bach’s Cello Suites and the like; I can forgive him — just barely — for the sexy videos he allowed to be made around his Bach performances. I also have to note with some awe that of all the media stars vaguely identifiable as “classical” musicians these days, Yo-Yo Ma is one of the most entitled. You couldn’t get near Royce Hall that night; what other cellist can you name who can sell out a large hall as Yo-Yo inevitably does? (Answer: none.) The “Silk Road” program, though exasperating as a hasty sampling of too little of too much, did come up with some terrific performances. Somebody should take hold of the “Mongolian long-song singer” named Khongorzul Ganbaatar and cast her as the Turandot of everybody’s dreams.

Okay, so there was Ms. Ganbaatar in one short “long song” plus an even shorter encore. There was some fabulous tabla playing by India’s Sandeep Das, in a composition of his own, and an extraordinary performance by Iranian-born Kayhan Kalhor in his brand-new piece that set his native kemancheh (“spike fiddle”) against a Western string ensemble. The well-known pipa player Wu Man, for whom Lou Harrison and Tan Dun have composed major works, was allotted one dazzling showoff piece but nothing to show her marvelous command of soft and haunting sonorities. Yo-Yo and pianist Joel Fan played the Cello Sonata by Claude Debussy, who was the first European to fall in love with — and, therefore, to appropriate into his own music — the tinkles and the harmonies from this other world. As the final encore, the whole aggregation of Mongolian, Iranian, Indian, Chinese and East Coast freelance performers joined their dissimilar talents in a sad and mysterious Italian folk tune, something that Marco Polo — the godfather of intercontinental travel –might have heard under his window back home in Venice.

Still, the whole affair was a curiously unsatisfying — if you’ll pardon the transculturation — smorgasbord of tidy but blandly spiced dishes, quickly served and quickly whisked away. Somewhere along that long and slicked-down highway I wanted to linger, to sample some of its scenery at greater length. The program was long enough — 90 minutes as noted in the printed program, more like 130 in actuality — but I left with the unshakable sense of having been shortchanged.

SONY CLASSICS HAS FINALLY released Tan Dun’s Water Passion After St. Matthew, the last of the four settings of biblical Passion texts commissioned by the International Bach Academy, performed and recorded live at Stuttgart in the summer of 2000. (The other three, by Golijov, Gubaidulina and Rihm, are available on Hänssler-Classic.) Setting Tan’s work, with its sense of otherworldly quiet and mystery, against the exuberance and fervor of Golijov’s St. Mark Passion makes for a fascinating contrast: two ardent, immensely talented musical minds envisioning a similar compositional assignment from, so it seems, the opposite ends of a telescope.

You can also draw interesting parallels between Tan’s work and the multicultural impulses behind Yo-Yo Ma’s “Silk Road Project.” Both are bridge-building efforts — Tan’s, between his own Chinese heritage and the Western interaction of faith and music; Yo-Yo’s, between the broad panorama of Asia’s musical aesthetics and the ears and expectations of a Western audience. Similar sounds are employed; Tan’s score also calls for the spike fiddle and ceramic flute that made some appealing racket at Royce Hall. Tan, however, builds his own “bridge” by subjecting his acoustic instruments to electronic processing.

Water Passion calls for relatively few
performers: a small chorus whose members also play Tibetan finger bells, two solo singers, solo strings and keyboard, and, as you might guess from Tan’s previous works, a gathering of percussion instruments including stones of various sizes and pitches, “water drums” (wooden salad bowls floating upside down in a water basin), a small soda bottle (for bubbling sounds), and water gongs partially immersed (an old John Cage/Lou Harrison trick). All this paraphernalia becomes a hypnotic counterpart to the words. “A sound is heard in water,” sings the chorus at the Last Supper (in Tan’s own textual embellishment of Matthew’s words). “The tears are crying for truth.”

I have had my problems with some of Tan’s music in the past. His big symphonies celebrating the millennium and the annexation of Hong Kong seem as much motivated by the spirit of the Hollywood epic as by musical matters. His Crouching Tiger film score (with the cello of Yo-Yo Ma as a voice in the wilderness of Ang Lee’s magic forest) and its later jiggering into concert material strike me as too clever by half. This Water Passion, however, and the 1999 Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra — commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and recorded on that orchestra’s own label — stand for the work of a composer newly baptized; I find them both greatly appealing.

There is hope for us yet. In the eight days that began with Golijov‘s St. Mark’s Passion and ended with John Adams‘ Naive and Sentimental Music, it was easy to feel good about music’s future — about the creation of new music, that is, if not always about its preservation in live performance or recording. Those works begin my current list of reasons for optimism, and the list goes on from there: Kaija Saariaho‘s opera, the other Passion settings introduced at Stuttgart, those young Brits, Germany’s extraordinary Helmut Lachenmann . . .

Adams‘ 48-minute orchestral workout was first played here in 1999 — by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic, for whom it was written — and recorded for Nonesuch. What a perfect match, Salonen and this music! Hearing it again at UCLA’s Royce Hall, as the major work in the orchestra‘s first Green Umbrella concert of the season, in a performance measurably more exuberant, richer in detail and momentum — enhanced by the superior sound at Royce — you could easily accept it as a portrait of Salonen himself, the wonderful fantasy and coloristic sense he brings to music that truly engages him (including, of course, his own). I’ve written about this work before, and will continue to do so as long as it can still offer new aspects for me to discover — such as, this time, the sense of constant, immaculately controlled growth in each of the three movements, set in conflict against the music‘s irresistible garrulity. The Philharmonic takes the work to New York in March, along with Adams’ El Niño. I‘ve heard New York audiences boo major works of Adams before; if they do so this time, it’ll be out of sheer envy.

The program at Royce also offered lesser Adams in his two-piano piece Hallelujah Junction, music of great charm but also a fair amount of talky-talk, tidily dispatched by Gloria Cheng and Grant Gershon. In between, for reasons I don‘t quite fathom, came Voices, a time-wasting piece for clarinet and orchestra, with the composer, Derek Bermel, as soloist and Adams conducting. The style is Smartass-Moderne: In the first movement the clarinet and orchestra ”converse“ in Silly Symphony squeaks and squawks; the slow movement affects a serious pose with a textbook-folksy tune over textbook scoring for harp and muted strings; the finale is a gruesome stab at New Orleans honky-tonk. ”Bad Lalo Schifrin,“ whispered a perceptive friend.

Then there is the other John Adams, an interesting composer (born in Mississippi, now living in Alaska) who has had to take on his middle name — as John Luther Adams — in self-defense. For his identity dilemma I have nothing but sympathy; my own namesakes, whose telephone calls I often receive, include an upholsterer, a magician and an actor born — or so he tells me — under the name of Benjamin Schultz. On the Cold Blue Music label there are three of this Adams’ landscape pieces, long, sustained harmonies with puffs of arctic winds blowing the sound one way or another: minimalism that makes the other Adams‘ minimal pieces sound downright hyperactive. The music — as much snow-strewn color as sound (but pleasurable in either guise) — is beautifully played by local folk, including the Ear Unit’s Amy Knoles, Marty Walker and Robin Lorentz.

ECM‘s Arvo-Part-of-the-month calls itself Orient Occident; add an ampersand and you have the name of the best if shortest work of the three on the disc. Orient Occident dates from 2000; it consists of a haunted, endless melodic line over a string tone with the same kind of bone-rattling harmony that makes Part’s Fratres an experience disturbing and rewarding. Sweden‘s commendable Tonu Kaljuste conducts all three works, including two for voices and orchestra, the 1984 Pilgrim’s Song for men‘s voices (mostly on a dour monotone) and strings, and a setting of Psalms 42-43 for women’s choir: somewhat chilling, but without the emotional impact of the disc‘s title music. As usual with the noble attention paid by ECM to Part’s music, the very nature of the recorded sound transports you to mysterious northern regions.

I didn‘t write about Hashirigaki after the enchanting performances at UCLA; other blithe spirits here may be better qualified to deal with the songs of the Beach Boys and the dances they seem to have inspired. To me the most fascinating music was the language: three speakersingerdancers of vastly different national origin, imparting to the Beach Boys’ lyrics and Gertrude Stein‘s airborne gibberish a rainbow of coloration through the diversity of accent. For that you can refer to the art of soundman, media alchemist and, yes, composer Heiner Goebbels.

Now there’s an ECM disc of Goebbels‘ Eislermaterial, a strangely moving piece meant as an homage to Hanns Eisler, that sad, sardonic genius who once roamed the streets of Hollywood in search of new aspects of Americana to loathe and enshrine in song. Eisler was Goebbels’ teacher, and his ”material“ is threaded through a dense new background — the living composer haunted by fragmentary dreams of the composer long dead. The songs are mostly from the years of Eisler‘s exile among us; the texts are by fellow exile Bertolt Brecht. They are flung in our faces — growled, howled, drenched in vitriol and vinegar — by Frankfurt’s legendary Ensemble Modern, with the German actor Josef Bierbichler, who might, from the sound of his voice, be 200 years old and possessed of 200 years of wisdom.

Mehli Mehta never seemed to mind that I always referred to him as ”the musical Mehta“; his 94 years had taught him humor and infinite forbearance, even to sharp-tongued critics who deplored the failure of son Zubin to rise to his father‘s level of eloquence. His legacy is the hundreds of players who went forth from his American Youth Symphony — junior orchestra for senior audiences — into good jobs with great orchestras in that rewarding if dangerous world.

I didn’t get to his AYS concerts as often as I wanted to; the few times I made it, I was always bowled over by the way those kids played. Last week, at the first of this season‘s Royce Hall concerts (free, kindly note), they took on the Mahler Fifth Symphony, which is hardly pablum for kiddie orchestras. It was a stunning performance; the first horn’s solos, the winds, and, in the well-known adagietto, the strings — all first-rate. Before the Mahler there was a Mozart symphony, crisp, elegant and beautifully spirited. The conducting was by Alexander Treger, who took over at Mehli‘s retirement four years ago. The smile they imparted to that music was Mehli’s own, perfectly preserved.

Nine years separate Dmitri Shostakovich’s start on his Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and the completion of his Sixth Symphony; hearing them both within a week at the Music Center constituted, among other pleasures, an interesting historical overview. In those nine years (1930–39) the composer‘s official esteem rose and plummeted like an out-of-control roller coaster. The opera, a huge worldwide success for years after its premiere, was then shot down — for Soviet audiences and, curiously, for the outside world as well — after the famous 1936 denunciation (“muddle instead of music”) by the USSR’s most powerful music critic, Joseph Stalin, the Martin Bernheimer of his day. Eventually Shostakovich would grovel his way back into official favor with his Fifth Symphony and with the promise that the Sixth would be cast as a vast choral homage to Lenin. When that promise did not materialize, Shostakovich again found himself on shaky ground, which continued its quivering at least until Stalin‘s death in 1953 and even beyond.

Given that well-documented lifetime of political and artistic insecurity, the strengths in these two dissimilar — but, in some sense at least, musically related — works are all the more surprising. Both share the epithet “tragedy-satire” that Shostakovich himself coined for the opera. Both reach expressive depths: the opera in the stark tragedy of its final act, the symphony in its mysterious opening movement, with its intense, wordless grief voiced by solo winds sounding above the dark buzzing of slow strings, then a single stroke on the gong (as in the Tchaikovsky “Pathetique”) to chill the blood. Both tickle — but do not elate — the senses with episodes of raucous, sardonic satire that totter at the brink of hell and offer a harrowing view of what lies beyond.

The Sixth is, indeed, a curious work. As with the Fifth, the slow movement is its emotional crown, music most amazing for the way it suggests so much with such modest means. The wind solos — now a wrenching long melody for English horn, now a passage for piccolo that must be the most powerful line ever conceived for that instrument — go on and on, single flickering candles barely piercing the darkness. The end of that movement is purely beautiful, the harsh, defiant opening theme now in a lustrous, soft major-key transfiguration. Mahler is the ancestral figure: the solo winds in the final movement of Das Lied von der Erde, the grinning death-dancers in the “Burleske” parts of the Ninth Symphony. Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic, very much at home in Mahler, brought out these similarities in their tense, spacious reading of the Shostakovich. I particularly admired his resistance to the easy laff in the final pages. Earlier on the program he had dealt most winningly with the fragrant elegances in Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin, and not at all rewardingly in a deadpan collaboration with Peter Serkin in a Mozart piano concerto (K. 453), whose depths remained unplumbed.

Lady Macbeth still makes its way, slowly. In Shostakovich‘s later revised (i.e., watered-down) version as Katerina Ismailova, it ran at the San Francisco and New York City operas in the 1960s. In its “pure” form it came to the Met in 1994, in a staging by Graham Vick that moved the 1850 action forward to include automobile, refrigerator and plastic trash bags. Nothing of the sort transpired here; Irina Molostova’s staging remained true to the period — its lyrical spirit and its boisterousness, both.

The opera arrived, however, burdened with jinxes — from the aforementioned Stalin putdown, to the grudging substitution for the originally scheduled War and Peace, to the recent longshore shutdown that cost the Los Angeles Opera access to George Tsypin‘s sets, which may still be somewhere on the high seas as I write. The triumph of the performance is, to some extent, the beating-back of those hoodoos. The local carpenters, armed with Tsypin’s blueprints, turned out a fair copy of the original Kirov Opera sets — rustic fences, barriers and balconies for the most part, with a garish red curtain behind which the errant Katerina and her nogoodnik Sergei went about their hanky-panky silhouetted by Alan Burrett‘s realistic lighting and Shostakovich’s superrealistic music.

It was a triumph shared, of course, by the music, and by the fabulous holler set up by Valery Gergiev and his visitors from the Kirov‘s own orchestra pit. It was not a night for subtlety or elegance; Shostakovich’s score had seen to that. It was, however, a night for some glorious showing off, with an extraordinarily gifted composer in his mid-20s, as Shostakovich was at the time, taking the full measure of a prodigious mass of pure orchestral virtuosity, as Gergiev and his 96 supremely gung-ho ensemble proved themselves to be.

It is easy to fall out of love with Katerina — the lady and her opera. The sheer vulgarity of the enterprise is the all-too-common operatic mix of exhilaration and kitsch (cf. Tosca et al.), here raised to stratospheric heights. Yet there are other kinds of operatic magic here as well; with one opera already behind him (and, thanks to Stalin, no more operas still to come), Shostakovich proved himself here the master of the dramatic, all-revealing melodic line. It‘s there already in Katerina’s opening “oh-how-I‘m-bored” cavatina, and it returns. The opera is crammed with entertainment; my favorite, I think, is the Policemen’s waltz tune, a haircut off Der Rosenkavalier and worthy to stand in its company.

Understandably for a run of seven consecutive days, the company arrived with as many as four principals for the major roles. On opening night there was Larissa Shevchenko as a robust Katerina, Vladimir Grishko as a loud-aplenty Sergei, and Vladimir Vaneev as the grump-voiced old father-in-law who gets his comeuppance in a plate of poisoned mushrooms. Nothing in the voice department was spectacular, nothing abject; I imagine that a midseason night at the Kirov‘s Mariinsky Theater would produce this level of well-routined vocal performance immensely buttressed — especially if you’re there on a Gergiev night — by the kind of musical leadership that streams from Gergiev‘s podium. In later performances, Maxim Shostakovich — the composer’s son, who has had a substantial American career since requesting asylum in 1981 — took over that well-stomped-upon podium and honorably defended the family name.

Anyhow, don‘t wring your hands over the loss of War and Peace. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk has better sex — and, for that matter, better music.

Two more hearings of Osvaldo Golijov‘s La Pasion Segun San Marcos have not dimmed the slash of its colors, its power to exhilarate, to stop the breath. Last weekend’s performances, as the peak of this year‘s Eclectic Orange Festival, did not quite draw the turn-away crowds I might have hoped for, nor was there a rerun of the wild 30-minute ovations that received the work at its premiere in stodgy Stuttgart and later in comparably staid Boston; five minutes past the final “amen” and the crowd was already halfway to the garage. But this in no way undermines the magnificence of the undertaking or its importance to the quality of musical life in these troubled times. We are, after all, dealing with Orange County and its steady but slow journey toward a state of cultural grace — the pathway smoothed by the ministrations of the O.C. Philharmonic Society and its visionary leader, Dean Corey. Nobody applauded between sections on either night, at least, and only one cell phone was audible from my centrally located seat. (There was a serious glitch in the sound system on Friday night: a layer of static from the speakers audible over the strings in the orchestra. It began almost immediately in the work, and was still there at the end. By Saturday, however, it had been repaired.)

One of my colleagues has already hailed the work as “the first masterpiece of the 21st century,” which is accurate in spirit but not in math. (It dates from 2000, after all, as does that other work of comparable stature, Kaija Saariaho’s L‘Amour de Loin. Come to think of it, I have no difficulty in ascribing masterpiece stature to all four of the Passion settings commissioned by the International Bach Academy in Stuttgart and performed there that year. Quite a time for the Muses, those twilight weeks of the last century!)

I have spent a lot of time, with varying degrees of success, trying to explain — to myself and to anyone else who might care — this process of transculturation whereby such old categories as “classical” and “popular” no longer define the current state of music — or, for that matter, of any of the arts. The excellence of Golijov’s big work is largely due to the ease with which it lies across boundaries.

Its basic language is a gorgeous vernacular: the vibrant rhythms and colors of samba, tango and jazz. What is truly remarkable is the way that, in Golijov‘s hands, this trove of source material can be made to adapt to moments of grand design and, as well, other moments of lesser proportion. At any size and expanse — the violent confrontation between Jesus and Caiaphas, the celebration of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, Peter’s weeping at his own betrayal of his master (a breath-stopping aria that has already taken on a separate existence as a recital item) — he seems able to master his chosen vernacular, and to bend it to an impressive range of musical meaning, as Mozart could master the broad implications of diatonic harmony and create his own miracles within its confines, or Bach the richness of baroque counterpoint.

Already in its two-year life span the work has gotten around, with performances in Boston last season and last summer at the Tanglewood and Ravinia festivals. The performances heard in Costa Mesa marked the beginning of a tour that reunites the performers from the Stuttgart premiere (and, therefore, the live-performance recording on Hanssler Classic): the extraordinary 53-member chorus of the Schola Cantorum of Caracas under its energetic director Maria Guinand, an “Orquesta La Pasion” also assembled in Caracas but drawing upon international freelance talent — a Japanese trumpeter, for example, and a Swedish percussionist — and some splendid vocal soloists. The remarkable soprano Luciana Souza (whose throat, says Golijov, “carries Brazil‘s DNA”) had sung his music last year at a Green Umbrella concert and was again on hand. Samia Ibrahim sang Peter’s great lament “Lua descolorida” (which Dawn Upshaw had sung two summers ago at Ojai) and seemed to hold the very air of Segerstrom Hall captive to her misty magic. Among the unlisted singers, who came out of the chorus for smaller solos along the way, my ear was most gratifyingly wooed by the deep, dark contralto of Lisbeth Rojas, in her few lines of Jesus‘ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. The tour ends at the Brooklyn Academy for three performances starting October 30. Robert Spano takes over Maria Guinand’s podium, and Dawn Upshaw comes in to sing the “Lua descolorida.” Okay, but it can‘t get any better than it was last weekend.

You have to wonder about the fate of this kind of special work — assuming, as I can easily assume, that its fame and popularity will grow. Professional or even semiprofessional choruses can be more or less easily led toward mastery of Messiah and the classical standards; it doesn’t follow, however, that they can operate as easily within a choral style that draws upon the nasality, the honks and the language quirks of the Latino street singing that punctuates Golijov‘s music. Esa-Pekka Salonen can draw convincing performances of Revueltas out of Philharmonic players, but there are wonderful outbursts of downright musical slang in Golijov’s expressive style that probably require both learning and unlearning from conservatory-trained symphonic musicians. I asked Golijov, at his pre-concert talk, about his hopes and fears for the future of the piece; he seemed diplomatically hopeful that future musicians will find it worth their while to master his unique language. Meanwhile, he is at work on a chamber opera — “something about the Middle East” — scheduled for the L.A. Philharmonic in February 2004.

Inevitably, the temptation is strong to draw comparisons between this great work of Golijov and another ambitious venture of similar intent, the John Adams–Peter Sellars El Niño that the Philharmonic has on its agenda for later this season. There are vast differences, of course, between the meticulously charted sentiment (or sentimentality, if you must) of Adams‘ music and the exuberant anarchy of the Golijov. Yet the convergences are no less striking in both works’ aiming to re-express the greatest biblical narrations in the terms and the language of a vital contemporary nation-ness. Note, however, that the dramatic impact of the Golijov Pasion needs no collaborator‘s name attached. The picture it created on the stage of Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Hall — such an ugly framework for such beauty! — was the ravishing spectacle of performers going about their art with love and, yes, passion.

Slim indeed was the turnout for Lorraine Hunt Lieberson‘s solo recital at Royce Hall last week; bountiful indeed were the rewards. She is every kind of phenomenal artist: majestic in stage manner, overpowering in her command of the shape of a vocal line. Just her opening phrase, a lightning bolt from Handel’s Ariodante, served notice that a sublime artist had taken possession of our ears and our souls; she went on from there.

It‘s interesting that she began her musical life as a violist. She still has that sound in her voice: rich, dark but infinitely variable, capable of the phrase that slashes, the phrase that woos. Her program was relatively brief, but in one sense too generous; her French group, for example, included only one song by each of five composers. After her starlit delivery of “Beau Soir,” I would have been happier with a further Debussy immersion, at the sacrifice of the lesser art of Chausson and Paladilhe, who do not flourish in the Debussy shadow. Robert Tweten’s excellent collaboration at the piano would also have justified a sturdier repertory choice.

Hunt Lieberson is the best singer around these days for the American repertory — for her command of melodic line, of course, but also for her ability to make language itself a thing of special beauty. I still have in my inner ear, from this remarkable concert, her shaping of the word “love” in one of Jane Kenyon‘s haunting last poems as set by Ricky Ian Gordon. At the end she sang songs by her husband, Peter Lieberson — son of the visionary Goddard Lieberson (whose exploration into unrecorded repertory the industry sorely lacks these days) and the airborne Vera Zorina — his settings of Rilke’s poetry at its most inscrutably expressionistic, nicely (and properly) set in a manner beholden to Hugo Wolf. At the very end she sang, of all surprising encore choices, H.T. Burleigh‘s fine old arrangement of “Deep River” — on the same stage, after all, where Thomas Quasthoff had sung “Ol’ Man River” not long ago.

Gloria Cheng‘s recital, the first of this season’s “Piano Sphere” events, was also diverse, perhaps to a fault. I cannot get close to Henri Dutilleux‘s scholarly but desiccated music; I once came close to blows with Andre Previn after he had inflicted one of the old boy’s symphonies on a Philharmonic audience. I admire Dutilleux‘s longevity (86 at last count) but hear his work as a persistence from the conservatoire academicism — Vincent d’Indy and his cronies — that drove Debussy and Ravel bonkers in an earlier era in French music. Gloria Cheng inflicted four dried-out bits of Dutilleux on a crowd at Zipper Hall (the Spheres‘ new venue) that, I’ll bet my chemise, would have been far happier if the opening Takemitsu selection had been three or four works instead of the one.

It was, otherwise, a fine, colorful, therefore typically Gloriaesque program: some strong recent works by Magnus Lindberg in their first local hearing, and two exquisite small bits by Earle Brown and Melissa Hui. Chinary Ung‘s piano suite Seven Mirrors delighted me not so much: music full of the pianistic bang-bang but rather less of the atmosphere I have heard in other work by this important Cambodian-born composer. But after the Chinary Ung came another small miracle, an encore consisting of the most delicate of the posthumous variations (No. 5) in Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes. It cleared the air and seemed to re-assert the supremacy of melody and harmony deployed in the cause of great art.

Frederic Rzewski‘s music is no stranger to Piano Spheres. I remember in particular being astonished by a performance of his De Profundis some years back, with Vicki Ray delivering Oscar Wilde’s heartbreaking lines and surrounding them with her own playing of Rzewski‘s lush and deeply disturbing musical commentary. Now, in a commendable act of faith, Nonesuch has brought out a seven-disc set of Rzewski’s performances of his own piano music, which includes on its final disc that same De Profundis, this time with the composer himself as both voice and pianist.

Born in Massachusetts in 1938, Rzewski has led a variegated career. After a solid immersion in Ivy League musical ideals, he shucked it all off, moved to Rome for a time, took up the notion of music as activism, turned out enormous pieces (mostly for piano, but often with voice or other “extraneous” elements mixed in) steeped in agitprop sentiments: songs of political prisoners here and abroad, of workers oppressed by bosses, of victims of society such as Oscar Wilde. His most famous piece, by title if not by substance, is an hourlong set of variations on the Chilean workers‘ song “The People United Will Never Be Defeated.” That, too, is included in the new Nonesuch set.

Rzewski’s music embraces many musics. Folksong in its broadest sense — going back to such kiddie stuff as the one about London Bridge falling down — gets ground in with newer sounds of crushing dissonance. There are big holes here and there to allow for improv. It is not a tidy repertory, but it is damned exciting.

Two of the seven discs are devoted to The Road, a piece only 50 percent completed so far; finished, it will last five hours, in eight parts. Each part is an eight-mile segment of the completed “road”; the nature of the road itself changes, from footpath to railroad track to whatever. Listening for an uninterrupted two-plus hours to the four parts so far available, you get the sense of being in a closed room with the music in the process of being born, the pianist-composer at one end, yourself at the other. There is no sense of reaching beyond that room, of grandly proclaiming great messages in a sold-out concert hall. If ever a piece of music could bring you close to the creative process, this is it.

A new season begins, in this land of no seasons. Three of our local orchestras sprang into action last week: two with brand-new music, one with older music of newer outlook. The week before, the much-admired Kronos Quartet brought in some new music, in a program appropriately titled “Nuevo,” most of which was quite comfortably, sometimes even thrillingly, old hat. A phenomenal percussion outfit, Tambuco, out of Mexico City, wore that hat in several numbers, and sent it skyward.

Costa Mesa’s Pacific Symphony, in Carl St. Clair‘s splendid hands, offered a world premiere, sort of: Tobias Picker’s Tres Sonetos de Amor in the first hearing of their orchestral setting. (The voice-plus-piano version had been heard in Minneapolis in 2000.) Picker is a known quantity hereabouts; his Fantastic Mr. Fox remains one of the bleakest pages in the L.A. Opera‘s annals; about his new opera, Therese Raquin, on the San Diego Opera docket next March, the advance word is equally bleak. None of this slows the flow from Picker’s well-worn pen, of course; his chosen manner of expression — a tepid wash of mild chromatic harmony lit from within by flashes of old melodic shapes smilingly remembered — is the sort of thing orchestras and opera companies like to place before anxious subscribers to prove that fears of bodily attack from new music can often be groundless. An operatic setting of An American Tragedy, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, is currently on his worktable.

The “love sonnets” are Pablo Neruda texts, and it is apparently Picker‘s whim to devise music as far removed as possible from the sense of this warm, spiky poetry. This perversity is further underscored by a tendency to smash contrapuntal lines against one another in differing keys, a trick Stravinsky was exercising to better effect as far back as his 1911 Petrouchka. I found these songs — about 15 minutes’ worth — drab beyond redemption, the more so in the chasm that yawned (an applicable word) between words and music. Nathan Gunn, a young baritone of great sensitivity (Marcello in the Bowl‘s La Boheme last summer), found more music in a brief tune from Don Giovanni, which he offered as his encore, than in anything before.

St. Clair, now in his 13th season as the PSO’s music director, has pulled the orchestra onward and upward. His programming suggests a growing respect for the ability of his audiences to countenance novelty, even in the one-spoonful-at-a-time dosage that works like these Picker songs represent. I am counting the days until William Bolcom‘s huge setting of the William Blake Songs of Innocence and Experience (all of it!) turns up next February. I like the production values at Pacific Symphony concerts, despite the abject ugliness of Segerstrom Hall itself. St. Clair talks well to his audiences, offering musical insights without condescension; in the final work on last week’s program, the descriptions of episodes in the gnarled scenario of Richard Strauss‘ Ein Heldenleben (from which I fled, as is my wont) were spelled out in supertitles in a further (if foredoomed) effort to help the work make sense.

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra also had a novelty of sorts, incongruously spatchcocked between Bach and Mozart at its inaugural concert: Les Espaces Infinis by the orchestra’s new composer in residence, Pierre Jalbert. New Hampshire–born (despite the name), Jalbert studied with George Crumb, information that might lead to higher expectations than this insipid 10-minute work fulfills. Its “spaces” are decidedly “finite”; it‘s the kind of piece where you know after about 10 seconds exactly where it is going and how: a thickening of the swirl, a quickening of the pace, some kind of resonant climax and then a regression to the soft glow as at the start. Wagner’s Lohengrin Prelude did it all, and better.

Better yet was the Bach, with everybody‘s favorite violinist, Hilary Hahn, as soloist in the E-major Concerto and collaborator (with LACO’s principal violin Margaret Batjer) in the D-minor Double. I worried at the start at the brisk tempos in the E-major; I needn‘t have. The give and take in the fast movements, between her solos and Jeffrey Kahane’s superb orchestra, were the stuff of high-level argumentation; the long cantilena above Bach‘s solemn, meditative orchestral foundation made of the slow movement a discourse on matters too profound for words. (Bach might disagree on this, however, since he recycled the same slow movement, plus a text for four-part chorus, in one of his cantatas.) The conversation between soloists in the Two-Violin Concerto was the discourse of two noble, loving and intensely dedicated spirits. Nobody I know of these days plays the Brahms Violin Concerto better than Hilary Hahn; very few play the Beethoven as well. Now she has a claim to stake in Bach as well, and she deserves every note.

Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana is as loathsome as any music I know — not merely ugly (as in Ein Heldenleben) but deeply offensive. The work‘s origins are part of my problem with it: an anthology of lithe, insidious medieval poetry on the varied joys of self-indulgence, dating from Germany’s golden legacy and lasciviously turned into a latter-day saturnalia for beer-slurping, marching hordes in lederhosen and white knee socks, a nation‘s heritage re-sculptured to the glorification of the fascist ideal, Albert Speer’s architecture made audible. This is music that should be kept away from small children, and from their parents as well.

The rest of my problem is that Carmina Burana, insidious in its every measure, is also irresistible. Choosing it as the major work on the Philharmonic‘s inaugural program is a matter between Esa-Pekka Salonen and his conscience; he told the audience at the Friday-night casual concert that Carmina Burana was the ABBA of classical music, and I guess that’s okay. He and his massed forces — including the soprano Harolyn Blackwell, a living wonder — played and sang the bejesus out of it. At the end the audience leaped to its feet and cheered, as did the storm troopers back in ‘37, when the work was new.

Before had come the suite from Bela Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin, dazzling, slashing, thrilling music from a composer still young but in full command. Of all the “new” (i.e., less than a century old) music of the week, this was the one piece that made statements strong and relevant to its time, that used the orchestra‘s resources with skill and imagination, that demonstrated a willingness to take the art of music to someplace new and worth our exploration. It was, by the calendar, the oldest music of the week and, by every other criterion, the newest.

I left the Paris Opera, late on a cold November night in 1983, convinced of two things. One was that the opera whose world premiere I had just suffered through, Olivier Messiaen’s Saint Francois d‘Assise, had no chance whatever of earning a place in the international repertory. The other was that, if such an unthinkable circumstance were to transpire, wild horses (les chevaux sauvages) could never drag me again into its presence.

It didn’t occur to me at the time to lavish blame on someone other than the aged Messiaen for what I had found interminably dull and overextended in this, his first and only opera. Surely the inspiring surroundings of the Opera‘s Palais Garnier, and the musical leadership of the redoubtable Seiji Ozawa, were above that blame, or so one had to believe. Full awareness came only later, with the appearance two years ago of the DG recording under Kent Nagano, which honored the aspirations toward eloquence in Messiaen’s music as the Paris production had not — for the eye or for the ear. Now, following productions in Salzburg and Berlin, the work has been installed at the San Francisco Opera (through October 17) in its first American staging.

The opera is still hard to love, though easier on discs than in the flesh. Over five hours we are invited to observe, without much in the way of confirming incident — the healing of the Leper aside — the growth in spirit and wisdom of Assisi‘s legendary saint, his rise above the lesser souls among his co-believers, his communion with Nature’s other creatures, most of all her birds. Birds, birds, birds: For something like 45 minutes the saintly Messiaen proclaims his own kinship with the saintly Francis in this matter of ornithological passion. One fidgets, vainly waiting for their feathered, clattering, chattering friends to get baked into a pie or, at least, to fly the coop.

There are few surprises in Messiaen‘s orchestra here, except for its sheer exuberance in the marshaling of his usual massed, apocalyptic brass, the urgent summonings of clattering mallet instruments, and no fewer than three of his iconic noisemakers, the wailing, throbbing keyboards known as the Ondes Martenot. Around and above all of this — and truly surprising — is the choral writing, the dense chording of semitones and microtones. In San Francisco’s extraordinary production, a congruence occurs between the deep and expansive choral texture and the visual effect of singers on a slow turntable seeming to fill an entire world with their presence and their sound. Overall it is texture, more than melody and harmony (which here — as elsewhere in the Messiaen oeuvre — borders on the banal and, now and then, crosses the line), that earns the most admiring attention in this ecstatic yet sporadically off-putting score.

Jose van Dam had pretty much owned the title role since the 1983 premiere; ownership has now passed, in glory, to Willard White (the Golaud in the L.A. Opera‘s Pelleas, the St. Joseph in the Philharmonic’s upcoming El Niño, thus asserting his mastery of roles both sacred and profane). That one role and that of an attendant Angel aside — set forth by Laura Aikin with irresistible, athletic charm — Saint Francois is not a singer‘s paradise; its strengths derive mostly from the tight interweave of its complex linearity. It fell to Donald Runnicles, the company’s music director and the most significant holdover from the previous administration, to bind this all together in a performance taut and rapturous.

Nicolas Brieger‘s production begins with silent film: Assisi’s great St. Francis Basilica brutally damaged by the 1997 earthquake. St. Francis‘ story, as he tells it, unfolds in both the distant past and only yesterday. Hans-Dieter Schaal’s stage builds on the recent horror; pieces of ruined crosses lie everywhere, extending menacingly out toward the audience, and Francis‘ rude cave abuts a modern three-story office building. Andrea Schmidt-Futterer’s costumes are also of no time and every time; the more earthly of the Franciscan brothers carry around bookkeeping ledgers and sport modern-day fedoras above their priestly robes. Alexander Koppelmann‘s lighting creates its own magic; a soft gray luminosity covers everything, and the colors that pierce through — a gorgeous blue streak that resolves into the Angel (complete with sunglasses) of Francis’ dreaming — create their own astonishment.

I‘m going on about the looks of this piece because, simply put, it transcends anything I have experienced in an American opera house. This is San Francisco’s first season actually planned from Pamela Rosenberg‘s new leadership. Of the new productions on her agenda, Saint Francois has, naturally, gotten the most notice; the production team includes old pals from her German years. That the opera lies on the difficult side makes her move the more courageous, and my enthusiasm for the result does not include any confidence of its success at the box office.

“Animating Opera” is the title Rosenberg has concocted for the repertory for the first years of her regime, through 2006. Under that rubric individual operas are further clumped and titled; the brochure reads like a college course catalog. Whether Saint Francois is, as the brochure reads, a “Seminal Work of Modern Times” is, however, arguable; I have similar doubts about Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All, the second work on the “seminal” list (up for 2003-04); both works strike me more as interesting dead ends. (I might have thought that Wagner‘s Parsifal would be the obvious “seminal” antecedent to Saint Francois, but there isn’t much Wagner in her syllabus at all, only a Flying Dutchman for 2004-05, listed under “Fairy Tales.”) Rosenberg‘s plan, fancy titles and all, is the work of a creative general director willing to integrate serious musical thinking into the entertainment value of the product. In these dreary days on the classical-music front, she emerges as a brave visionary. Yet the question lingers: Is the stature of “seminality” adequate justification for a work’s arrival into the repertory? To the list of works of undeniable influence that are also lousy entertainment I must — with all respect to the marvelous production and in defiance of the cheering multitudes in San Francisco last week — add Saint Francois d‘Assise.

The rest of my San Francisco week, Turandot and Ariadne auf Naxos, was largely business as usual. Jane Eaglen’s Turandot blazed mightily against the obsessive redness of David Hockney‘s 1993 sets, but Runnicles’ leadership this time was curiously flaccid — at times downright tired. There was also Patricia Racette‘s intensely lovable Liu; Jon Villars’ sturdy, high-decibel Calaf did, alas, wander from pitch once or twice. Deborah Voigt‘s splendid Ariadne and Laura Claycomb’s stratospheric Zerbinetta sparked director John Cox‘s unexceptionable take — first seen at the Chicago Lyric in 1998 — on the Richard Strauss charmer. Two nights in a row, the fat ladies got to sing — and did they ever!