So I've Heard

SOONER OR LATER MOST OPERA COMPANIES get around to Nabucco. It has its historic place, as Verdi’s first triumph and for the “Va pensiero” chorus that became the anthem of oppressed Italy. (At the L.A. Opera the chorus was encored, and cheered both times.) Hebrews, virgins, Babylonians, the first of the great father-daughter duets that thread like a golden gleam through the composer’s legacy: The vintage Verdi is all there in this raw, primitive score. I’ve had my blood made to sizzle at Nabucco performances . . . but not this time.

From the pit there was the usual Lawrence Foster routine: You waited in vain for a transcendent shaping of those crude but soaring phrases. You also waited in vain for scenery and stage action to match the bronzes and brasses of the music. The program listed estimable names: Jane Greenwood’s costumes, Michael Yeargan’s sets, Elijah Moshinsky’s production and Thor Steingraber’s staging; I couldn’t bring myself to believe that any of the above were within miles of the Nabucco currently at the Chandler Pavilion. Greenwood’s costume design puts the Nabucco in red jammies against Alan Burrett’s red lighting and thus turned him into a floating head. Maria Guleghina, from the Met’s current stable of blockbuster sopranos, sang the bad daughter, Abigaille; Kate Aldrich was the good daughter, Fenena. As Nabucco, the Georgian (Tbilisi, not Atlanta) baritone Lado Ataneli displayed a smallish but impressively Verdian vocal line.

Sooner or later some companies also get around to Puccini’s spaghetti Western, but not for as good a reason. I hear less musical impulse in The Girl of the Golden West than in any other mature Puccini; if you left with any tune in your head, it would have to be one of the American folksongs that got co-opted here and there. The orchestration is thick and unwieldy; the usual Puccini trick of doubling the vocal line in the orchestra at a couple of octaves’ distance — so elegant and touching in La Bohème — becomes in this work a boring, obsessive mannerism. As “Meester Johnson di Sacramento” and his ladylove, pistol-packin’ Minnie, Plácido Domingo and Catherine Malfitano made a lot of noise, some of it impressive; as the love-racked “Sceriffo,” Wolfgang Brendel provided the evening’s only real vocal style. Simone Young conducted, sleepily at first, later with impressive momentum. The fight scenes were terrific, with a few Hollywood stuntmen worked into the ensemble; best of all was Burrett’s lighting, which looked as if someone had actually been up to the gold country and remembered its magic.

WHATEVER ELSE YOU MAY SAY ABOUT THE rumblings (backstage and out front) around the start of the Los Angeles Opera’s 17th season, the fact remains that the company did get its curtain up on time for these first two productions earlier this month. That didn’t happen last year, due to the 9/11 turmoil. Two operas, neither of them anybody’s particular favorite but both of them worth doing sometime or other, came across in a more or less recognizable state.

Those rumblings need our attention, of course. Two blockbuster-size ventures that figured prominently in the company’s immediate or middle-distance plans have now been dumped or at least tabled: Prokofiev’s War and Peace, formerly due next month, and Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, originally slated for next year and now rescheduled for God knows when. Both announcements arrived to a chorus of weeping and wailing and grave doubts as to whether opera in Los Angeles now truly lies dead in the water — as some cynics had foretold at the company’s inaugural in 1986.

The Prokofiev was to be a guest shot by Valery Gergiev’s Kirov Opera, a production already trundled to the Met last year, where its sheer and costly bulk created several kinds of havoc even in that huge house. As a solace, the Kirov is sending us a less pricey production, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which is also — dare I breathe it? — a better opera all told. Yes, there are eloquent moments in War and Peace, along with some pretty waltzes (in the “Peace” part, of course) and some battle fireworks; there is also an earlier Kirov production that came to San Francisco several years ago, and which I praised at its video release in 1996, modest and imaginative and as clear a realization of Tolstoy’s convolutions as the eye could want. Nowadays, however, there are patrons with blockbuster bankrolls who require blockbuster productions onto which their own names are prominently plastered, which then run the risk of being stranded for lack of travel funds when the moneybags spring a leak.

This new blockbuster-will-save-us mentality looms even more menacingly over the whole Ring business, and has ever since the project was first announced — ecstatically, if you recall — at Plácido Domingo’s first major press conference, two years ago. Isn’t this a strange time for the Ring to bulk so large in opera companies’ planning here, there and everywhere? (There are faint rumors, in fact, that Los Angeles’ first Ring might come not from the Music Center but from a curious alliance of UCLA’s Performing Arts division and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.) From the beginning, all we’ve known about the L.A. Opera’s Ring is the looks of the thing: all those kazillions of dollars for George Lucas’ light shows and a Valhalla worthy of Vegas. All this at a time when the world’s vocal resources can afford maybe one and a half capable casts to cope with Wagner’s blockbuster vocal writing. Does the estimable Jane Eaglen face a lifetime of a Brünnhilde one night in Minneapolis and the next night in San Diego?

Much as I love — or, let’s say, revere — Wagner’s stupendous game plan, it strikes me as lazy thinking, this assumption that an opera company doesn’t earn its place on the map without a Ring under its belt. If we must posit the list of what the L.A. Opera owes its audience, many items come to mind, most of them more necessary (and more practicable) than this pie-in-the-sky project. Under the Wagner rubric there is, for starters, Die Meistersinger, a work that could restore anyone’s faith in Wagner — and, for that matter, in opera itself. (Peter Hemmings promised it once, but then backed down.) The company owes a huge Verdi deficit: a Don Carlo and Ballo in Maschera to atone for previous misdeeds, a Forza del Destino long overdue, a Simon Boccanegra likewise. And imagine a company so lopsided on matters Russian that it can give us Pique Dame and Lady Macbeth but never yet a Boris Godunov. Sondheim, anyone? What a ravishing A Little Night Music that stage could hold! Against these problems, all this talk about War and Peace and the Skywalker Ranch Ring might strike observant outsiders as unbalanced. Some insiders, too.

CARL STONE’S MUSIC IS THE FOOD OF, well, music. It feeds on found objects – a Schubert fragment, a Tokyo street noise – and raises them to a higher level. In his hands, and through his serendipitous, madcap brain, the process of recycling becomes true art.

Alone at his iBook laptop, a scarcely larger 8-track mixer at his side, Stone can press a single key and unleash the combined might of a dozen symphony orchestras, a thousand-voice chorus or the scratch of a toothpick across a napkin – whatever his all-questing sampling software has deemed worthy of his processing. A few more keys, and these sampled sound sources collide to form a musical score with beginning, climactic middle and logical end. His music is terrifyingly new, but he’s been at it for a long time, probably half of his current 49 years.

At the Schindler House in West Hollywood, designed and lived in by the illustrious architect Rudolf Schindler and now the home of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Stone performed some of his recent music a couple of weeks ago, and produced some of his accustomed enchantment. The crowd that turned up that Saturday night strained the capacity of Schindler’s small courtyard. The setting was not ideal, perhaps; a small plane overhead did battle with the opening drone of Stone’s Nak Won. Yet the history of the place justified the event. John Cage lived there for a time, and he would certainly have approved Stone’s presence there.

At intermission the talk was all about gadgetry: so much sound out of so little. I would have liked more talk about the music itself, which was powerful, astonishing and gorgeous. People still haven’t made their peace with the Machine; there’s less to watch, perhaps, in the spectacle of one slight, bookish, intent figure hunched over two small pieces of electronic gear than in a stageful of orchestral musicians sawing away at their sharps and flats and associated hieroglyphics. Still, there was the sense that night of music being created, the awareness that that evening’s performance would be different from performances of music of the same name on other nights – in the same way that Esa-Pekka Salonen’s performance of a Mahler symphony, or Plácido Domingo’s of a Verdi aria, won’t be the same on any two nights. That’s why people go to live musical events in preference to collecting records – or should.

I go back a long way in this matter of sounds electronically produced and turned into artistic designs. In 1961 I was at the famous concert at Columbia University where the first products of the Mark II synthesizer, built by RCA and bankrolled by Columbia and Princeton, were set before an audience. The synthesizer itself took up a fair-sized room in a warehouse near the Hudson River, and employed something like 750 vacuum tubes. It swallowed a composer’s visions in the form of stacks of punched cards, and produced its sounds a few seconds at a time. The music – the work of Milton Babbitt, Mario Davidovsky, Vladimir Ussachevsky and others in this first electronic generation – was created on that enormous machine, captured on tape and brought to Columbia’s McMillin Theater, where it was played through loudspeakers. In one or two pieces there were also live participants – a violinist, a singer. But the fear, many times expressed by that pioneering audience in response to those pioneering composers, was simply this: Will the music of the future require that an audience sit in an auditorium and stare at a bunch of loudspeakers? (The RCA Mark II, by the way, was vandalized during a break-in in 1976. There was no reason to restore it; it was already obsolete.)

Eventually there would be comforting answers to the question of depersonalization. Morton Subotnick, whom I had known as a freelance clarinetist in San Francisco in the 1950s, made his entry into electronic music with large-scale, “symphonic” pieces – Silver Apples of the Moon, The Wild Bull – created on one of Donald Buchla’s synthesizers and recorded on best-selling Nonesuch LPs. A kind of musical cryogenics was at work here; when you owned the disc, you owned the composition itself, with no printed score or live virtuoso in the middle. By the late 1960s, at CalArts, Stanford’s CCRMA and France’s IRCAM, composers were developing means of creating interaction between music immobile on a reel of tape and technology to include the live musician as participant. At CalArts, Subotnick and his colleagues linked synthesizer, tape and computer software in what they called “ghost” electronics; by whatever name, it served to bridge the gap between the cold, impersonal loudspeakers and the sense that music was actually being created on the stage – as a pianist might create a sonata, an opera company an opera.

CARL STONE WAS ONE OF SUBOTNICK’S first students at CalArts. Later he served as music director at KPFK, in the days when that station stood for something in the matter of experimentation and exploration at the outer edges of thought and creativity. He has always had his hands on knobs and dials, bells and whistles; beyond that, his works have always had the same motivating force that we listen for in great music of any time and style. We listen, after all, for the pleasure wonderful ideas afford our nerve endings, but we listen as well for the pleasure of being able to move with the music’s momentum, to sense where it is going and – above all – to sense when that journey has completed its trajectory and brought us home. I heard that in Stone’s music at Schindler that night: in the first work, Nak Won, which moved for about 20 minutes along a shapely and logical parabola; in the last work, Darul Kabap, which unfolded like a jazz jam that, again, ended exactly where it should. (For reasons he’s entitled to, Stone tends to name his works after favorite Asian restaurants or menu items.)

One of my favorites among Stone’s works is Shing Kee, one of “Four Pieces” on the New Albion label; its material is a tiny phrase from a Schubert song, which he has sampled and reconstructed from the quiet throb of the piano at the start to the full blossoming of the phrase some 15 minutes later. What I hear in this music is two composers at work some 175 years apart: Schubert in constructing his eloquent phrase, Stone in delving deeply into the source of its eloquence. And what’s most amazing is the way those two guys get along.

MY OH MY, HOW THE LETTERS HAVE poured in! “How could you?” their writers fairly scream, as if I had turned my back on motherhood, America and a hot lunch for orphans — which, by the way, I haven’t. What I did, in all innocence and, I think, all honesty, was to note my displeasure at being subjected to just short of a full hour of Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, complete with narration, dancing and what has always struck me in this work as an agonizing predilection for padding by repetition. Minus the storyline — whose garrulousness suffers in translation from the folksy French — and the music’s tendency to chew its cabbage once or twice too often, The Soldier’s Tale boils down to a 23-minute suite: not top-drawer Stravinsky, but bearable. At the Ford Amphitheater the cabbage was expertly sliced by Esa-Pekka Salonen and a state-of-the-art ensemble, but we still were served the whole head to try to digest.

This is my statement on Stravinsky, definitive as of this morning but — as with all my statements — subject to change at the drop of a downbeat. I admire above all the pleasure in his own technique that his music radiates, his own joy in the act of composition. The Rite of Spring remains his supreme score, most of all for the sheer arrogance that enabled its creation. It stands — beside Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Beethoven’s “Eroica” and not much else — as one of the truly brave, inexplicable forward steps in the arts. Stravinsky never lost the motive power that his arrogance provided. It led him in time to the composition of other excellent scores, alongside a large repertory of intellectual flimflam that, had it not flowed from the pen of the composer of The Rite, would surely have languished in limbo long ago. Not since George Frederick Handel had a major composer produced so high a proportion of trash to masterworks. One of the ongoing astonishments about Stravinsky comes when you try to equate, say, the triviality of the Four Norwegian Moods with the fervor of the Symphony of Psalms, the desiccated gestures of the Violin Concerto or Oedipus Rex with the elegant inventions in Orpheus.

I admire his continued curiosity. The Soldier’s Tale came from a time, near the end of WWI, when awareness of America’s music had begun to inundate European imaginations. American ragtime caught on quickly, more so at the start in Europe than in the United States. It conquered Stravinsky early in his game; there is some of it in The Soldier’s Tale, and there are also two other ragtime pieces from 1918-19, both of them truly awful. In a career spanning over half a century he seemed obsessed with trying his hand, at least once, at every new musical style that came down the pike, and in those between-the-wars decades there were plenty of new styles to try.

The failure rate may have been high; I don’t hold much hope for the claims to eternal-masterpiece status of most of the hybrids: the pseudo-baroque works like Pulcinella and the chamber concertos, the pseudo-atonal works like Abraham and Isaac, the pseudo-medieval Mass or the pseudo-Tchaikovsky Fairy’s Kiss. About the pseudo-Donizetti Rake’s Progress I change my mind with every performance I witness. Yet we can read into the best of these works — or, let’s say, the least worst — the process of a vigorous, questing mind investigating the vast panorama of his chosen art and trying it all on for size. That’s a time-honored process; Bach studied his contemporaries by copying out and adapting their music, and Mozart did the same with Bach.

IT’S A LAZY MAN’S PROCESS, IT SEEMS to me, to assume that every work by even the most revered composers deserves a place in the active repertory. The great composers aspire to a place far ahead of the popular taste of their time; you can easily verify this by getting hold of a copy of Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective, a large collection of the attempts by critics contemporary to famous works of the past to apply the standards of their time and, thus, to demolish these works. Slonimsky’s book, by the way, has just been newly republished by W.W. Norton; it deserves a place under the pillow of every critic, amateur or employed.

But composers have to eat. It’s depressing to read that Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy and his Battle Symphony rode at the front of Vienna’s hit parade while their composer toiled over his last string quartets. Does this necessarily mean, however, that either of these truly terrible works — or the King Stephan Overture or the variations for piano on “God Save the King” — deserves a place in the contemporary repertory? Isn’t it important that we remain aware that Beethoven, like Homer, could nod now and then? (I have to admit, however, that the Battle Symphony goes well with the fireworks at the Hollywood Bowl.)

Not necessarily, I suggest, as I fondle my own list of personal detestations that ride on the coattails of their makers’ better attempts. The Brahms German Requiem, it will surprise no regular reader to learn, rides high on that list; can this intensely gloom-ridden work, with its page upon page of clogged, aching counterpoint and its damp choral textures the consistency of last week’s Kartoffel-knödel, have flowed from the same pen that would later shape the B-flat Piano Concerto and the Clarinet Quintet? Can it be that only a year separates the wet wool of Schumann’s D-minor Symphony from the glorious exuberance of his Piano Quintet? Would Claude Debussy’s Martyrdom of St. Sebastian stand a chance in the repertory were its composer not also the creator of La Mer and Pelléas? Or, to reverse the tide, how is it that the Fourth Symphony of Jan Sibelius manages to survive when its six companions, and all those gooey tone poems, are cut from fabric infinitely more drab, more “indigenously Nordic” as the record blurbs read — and, thus, infinitely more popular?

I’m just asking. Keep the letters coming, folks.

1.34 METERS TALL, SHORT ARMS, SEVEN FINGERS — four right, three left — large, relatively well-formed head, brown eyes, distinctive lips; profession: singer — so reads, in its entirety, Thomas Quasthoff’s autobiographical entry on his Web site: a profile in courage and in whimsy. The amazement around this extraordinary figure continues; last week, in his first appearance at the Hollywood Bowl, Quasthoff — the man and his art — filled the space quite amply. In his previous appearances this year, with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra indoors, he had sung Bach, Ravel and “Ol’ Man River.” This time he sang six of the dozen or so songs to texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn that Gustav Mahler had written early on while girding up to take on the symphonic dragon. Six more were sung by another splendid singer, the Finnish mezzo-soprano Lilli Paasikivi, whom we had heard earlier this year in other, less-rewarding Mahler, Das Klagende Lied at the Music Center. Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic clothed it all with the glowing, pliant sounds of the young Mahler’s glistening orchestrations. By the time Quasthoff had ended the cycle with the mystical shimmer of “Urlicht,” the song that Mahler would later insert into his Second Symphony (but with a mezzo as the solo singer), there was a quietness at the Bowl that held all 6,000 of us in its grip. Great art, great artists, great artistry — they determine their own size.

What ravishing music, these Wunderhorn songs! They offer us early glimpses into Mahler’s workshop, but they take us far beyond. He moved the “Urlicht” verbatim into the Second Symphony, but he also put another of the songs, the one about St. Anthony preaching to the fish, through a drastic transformation — doubled in length, with a whole new middle section — to serve as the scherzo of that same work. Seventy-five years later, Luciano Berio was to co-opt that same scherzo as a “container” for a great tangle of added paraphernalia — voices, other musical quotations, what have you — in his Sinfonia.

But the songs aren’t merely “early” works, of a composer still on the bottom rung; they are rich, deep, sometimes disturbing: raucous and grotesque at times (like the middle movements of the Ninth Symphony), harrowing in their simple beauty (like the Adagietto of the Fifth). Salonen’s Mahler is a familiar commodity; his big-time arrival was with a performance of the Third Symphony (which also contains Wunderhorn music). His work at the Bowl that night wasn’t merely that of accompanist to two fine singers; through those lousy loudspeakers and the noise-infested air, all three created a kind of chamber music writ simultaneously very small and very large. It made people listen, as they don’t always in that troubled venue. It may have even made people forget the overripe awfulness of Richard Strauss’ Zarathustra, which had begun the program on some other planet.

IT WASN’T BILLED AS SUCH, BUT THE MUSIC THE last two weeks on both sides of the Cahuenga Pass amounted to a Salonen festival: four Philharmonic programs at the Bowl and a chamber-music event across the street at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater. A rendezvous with dentistry kept me from the last of the Bowl concerts, but the presence of Sibelius on the program softened the loss.

The Ford’s week of chamber music began on Monday with a guest shot from SummerFest La Jolla, Cho-Liang Lin’s annual festival in that coastal paradise. For Lin, Salonen composed Lachen Verlernt (“Laughing Unlearnt”), a short but well-packed piece for solo violin, moving graciously over 10 minutes from broad, contemplative melodic lines to a later outburst of good, solid old-timey virtuosity. (Are there Gypsies in Finland?) Better yet was a return visit of Salonen’s Five Images After Sappho, the flavorsome song cycle first sung by Laura Claycomb at Ojai in 1999, later recorded by Dawn Upshaw, and delivered last week with infinite charm by Heidi Grant Murphy. Following intermission there was Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale — all of it, alas, nearly an hour’s worth — with John Rubinstein’s high-intensity delivery of all three spoken roles, John Malashock’s choreography in case anyone missed the point of the narration, and Salonen leading a best-in-show instrumental ensemble sparked by Leila Josefowicz’s rocket-powered violin at one end of the scale and Steven Schick’s devil-driven percussion at the other end. Nothing surprised me as much as the realization of how much I disliked the piece. I must work that out over the next few days; stay tuned.

Wednesday’s program brought in the year-old New Hollywood String Quartet, a group formed last year and bearing the name of a much-revered ensemble from the past whose memories the new group does not evoke in the least. Like the old Hollywood, the new group is made up of studio freelancers; unlike the old Hollywood, the new group plays like studio freelancers even when it’s on a concert stage. In the Mendelssohn quartet that began its concert, the playing seemed to be about just another gig: slick, proficient and seemingly unaware of the elegant, fond curves that made up the heart of this music. Real movie music followed: a meandering, faceless piece by Don Davis (The Matrix) and, more bearable, some of Bernard Herrmann’s North by Northwest music, set for string quartet by Randy Kerber.

Two measures into a Haydn trio, and I knew what I had missed from the New Hollywoods. The Ahn Trio — two twins plus a sister, born in Seoul, trained at Juilliard — played their Friday program like angels on vitamins. Maybe Haydn’s E-flat Trio (No. 29, if you’re counting) was the most adventurous music on a program otherwise full of movie and movie-ish fare, but at least these kids played as if they knew what musical adventure is, or can be. For the Haydn, that meant some wonderful jolts as the harmony kept taking weird turns into the middle of next week and the rhythms did likewise. In pieces written for the group by the veterans Maurice Jarre (Dr. Zhivago) and Michael Nyman (The Piano), that meant more of an amiable saunter past the ghost of, let’s say, your favorite café composer of the 1930s; in Kenji Bunch’s Swing Shift: Music for Evening Hours, a suggestion might be made for shorter hours.

The kids are great, and you can’t begrudge them the shadow of MTV that falls over their work. Even so, there’s a grand repertory of classical trios out there, which needs all the help it can get.

Santa Fe‘s opera house is a scenery-studded 800-mile drive from Los Angeles; last week it seemed like home away from home. You ran into familiar Los Angeles faces everywhere — at the operas, and at other soul-renewing gathering places by day. John Crosby, who founded the Santa Fe Opera in 1957 and ran it until two years ago, wanted it that way: an imperial entity (like Bayreuth or Salzburg) to which people made pilgrimages from beyond the mountains. When Richard Gaddes took over last year, one of his first moves was to lure the local community into discovering that, up there on the hills above town, one of the world’s great musical ventures was alive and thriving. Crosby mightn‘t have cared less.

To that end, for example, Gaddes had the supertitle system — on small screens built into the backs of the seats, as at the Met — jiggered so that, with a push of a button, the text came on in either English or Spanish. That one move, out of many community-wooings instituted by Gaddes, boosted attendance last year by something like 5,000. Before Gaddes came to Santa Fe, he had founded and run the adventurous Opera Theater of St. Louis. You could say, in fact, that Crosby and Gaddes were the co-inventors of American summer opera — not just as casual outdoor entertainment (as at the Hollywood Bowl) but as an art form with its own unique shape and impact.

I saw five operas in five nights, and was both delighted and moved on most of those nights. The season’s new work — there‘s always one — was Kaija Saariaho’s L‘Amour de Loin, about which ecstatic reports (plus a few pirated broadcast tapes) had been circulating since the work’s premiere at Salzburg in 2000. That made it the summer‘s hot-ticket item for its three scheduled performances, so much so that management was obliged to sell tickets as well to the final dress rehearsal. Reports from abroad did not exaggerate; this is a work of extraordinary power and beauty. It is a work that, furthermore, restores to the lyric stage the quality of myth and mystery, an appeal to an audience to lose itself in timeless imagery, not just the reworking of some popular movie scenario that usually passes for operatic novelty these days. It is, in other words, a genuine opera.

The text, by the Paris-based Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, is drawn from the medieval account of the troubadour Jaufre Rudel, the Countess Clemence whom he worships from afar for her purity of heart and body, and the Pilgrim who crosses the Mediterranean as a go-between to carry messages to the separated lovers. They, at the end, are united in transfiguring death. Peter Sellars’ evocative production filled the stage with water. That not only signified the gulf separating the lovers; it also cast a rippling shimmer that gorgeously reflected Saariaho‘s deep, dark, haunting music — the orchestra wondrously enhanced by subtle interspersed electronics. There is some of Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande in the flow of the vocal lines and in the orchestral undercurrents as well. Dawn Upshaw, who has owned the role of Clemence from the beginning, gave the performance that enlarged upon everything we thought we knew about her vocal realm. Simply put, her final ironic outburst, as the dead Jaufre lies in her arms, was the stuff of sublime operatic drama.

Monica Groop — the Melisande here not many years ago — was the Pilgrim; Gerald Finley, the Troubadour; Robert Spano conducted and wove from his orchestra a fabric that you could almost feel as well as hear. In Santa Fe‘s recently rebuilt opera house, in its unreal setting high on a mountainside, one of the spectacular aspects is the sound of that orchestra in that pit. A representative from Saariaho’s publisher allowed that there would be a recording, but not right away.

On other nights there was Stephanie Blythe‘s stunning, stage-filling Isabella in a hokey but endearingly updated The Italian Girl in Algiers, with, for example, a downed airplane to replace Rossini’s shipwreck. A shapely, classical staging of Mozart‘s La Clemenza di Tito — like the Italiana, a company premiere — was brightly lit by the agile, communicative Sesto of Kristine Jepson (the Sister Helen of Opera Pacific’s hapless Dead Man Walking). Patricia Racette, the enchanting Mimi last month in the Hollywood Bowl‘s La Boheme, was similarly splendid in an otherwise ho-hum Eugene Onegin; Rodney Gilfry, who was listed as Onegin, had dropped out — a victim, perhaps, of the task of singing operatic leads at 7,500 feet above sea level; Scott Hendricks was the merely adequate replacement. Racette also filled in, on short notice but firmly in command, for the ”vocally exhausted“ Sondra Radvanovsky in a La Traviata, stodgily conducted by John Crosby with all the standard-issue cuts: the cabalettas for Alfredo and Giorgio and the second stanzas of familiar arias.

For the first time since 1977, there was no opera by Richard Strauss; the scheduled Liebe der Danae was dropped — expensive production vs. traveling caution — after 911. The loss will be atoned for next season with a revival of Intermezzo. In his 40-plus years of imperial leadership, Crosby had imposed a distinctive image on the company: Strauss up the bazooty, relatively little Verdi, even less Wagner, a generous but selective attention to latter-day repertory (Stravinsky, Henze and the American premieres of Berg’s Lulu in both the two- and three-act versions).

Gaddes‘ plans aim at even broader horizons. Next summer’s list also includes Bright Sheng‘s Madame Mao in its world premiere. There are plans to further integrate the opera company into city life with winter performances in the downtown movie theater that has become Santa Fe’s performing-arts center. Part of the pleasure in journeying to Santa Fe from beyond the mountains is the chance to watch the steady taking-shape of a music consciousness there, a nice counterpoint to the plethora of art galleries and local crafts that have always made the place unique. For this the majestic Crosby can take his share of credit. So, now, can Gaddes. Last year Mayor Larry Delgado, himself an opera lover at least as far up the scale as Carmen, proclaimed a Richard Gaddes Day. John Crosby would have been horrified.

What makes an opera work? If I had to guide a friend through the devious answers to that question, my final goal would be an understanding of the human interplay with Mozart‘s music in The Marriage of Figaro, tempered with awe at the interaction of harmony and tragedy in Berg’s Wozzeck. There would be other major mileposts along our way — Verdi‘s Otello, Wagner’s Die Meistersinger and parts of the Ring, Monteverdi‘s Orfeo, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. We would start with La Boheme, and we would stay there for quite a while.

Hearing Puccini‘s infinitely appealing score at the Hollywood Bowl the other night, in a generally excellent performance under John Mauceri, even without scenery and with the cast — excellently led by Patricia Racette’s Mimi — in evening clothes, I found myself amazed once again (for perhaps the 500th time) at what a sure piece of dramatic workmanship it all is. Let me run through a few of the moments that tickled my fancy this latest time around:

The very opening: It takes two brief musical phrases — Marcello‘s music ill-tempered and choppy, Rodolfo’s response lyrical, soaring — and we know these two characters as well as they know each other. Later, Rodolfo‘s graceful curve of a tune will recur during his first outpouring to Mimi (”Che gelida manina . . .“).

The guys plan their outing, to spend some newfound cash downstairs at the cafe. A melody winds its way softly through the orchestra, distinctive in its antique harmonies (parallel fifths! automatic D-minus!); it might be an old Christmas carol. The same tune, more joyous and aggressive, will usher in the festivities in Act 2. It will reappear, chill and bleak, at the start of Act 3, where it will transform into a haunting tone poem about a dismal corner of wintry Paris at daybreak. I love Puccini’s atmosphere pieces, usually at the start of operatic acts: the Roman daybreak in the last act of Tosca, life along the river at the start of Il Tabarro, dawn breaking over Nagasaki near the end of Madama Butterfly, even the offstage choruses resounding through the Chinese night in Turandot, leading up to ”Nessun dorma.“

Mimi knocks and enters; soft strings fill the room with her aroma. Her radiant, quiet tune becomes her first song to Rodolfo (”Mi chiamano Mimi“); it will identify her throughout the opera, will turn sad under her farewell in Act 3, and will shatter and drift away as her life ebbs at the end. Listen, in this first encounter, as she and Rodolfo move toward each other, shyly and with broken phrases, then a more substantial vocal line as their hands touch.

The second act of La Boheme is surely Puccini‘s shortest: under 18 minutes in my favorite recording (Tebaldi-Bergonzi). It’s amazing how much takes place, with the interplay among the ”Bohemians“ down front, the biz with Musetta and her sugar daddy, the street kids and their balloons, the panorama of surging Paris life, including parading tin soldiers, on Christmas Eve. It‘s all like cinematic writing before its time, and you can’t resist.

It‘s easy enough to poke holes in Puccini’s art, and heaven knows that I‘ve done my share. I saw the new movie of Tosca, fell in love with Angela Gheorghiu in the title role, and still came home with the empty feeling of having wasted two hours on music that constantly must strain for its dramatic effect, whose harmonies curdle the senses with their drab insistence, whose characters derive no life from their music and remain cardboard even in moments of high passion. La Boheme is different; it teems with life, it reaches out in its youthful urgency and pulls you in. It survives restaging, as in the not-bad Baz Luhrmann updating now available on video and supposedly Broadway-bound. Its storyline outlives generation gaps, but its music retains its appeal even more fiercely. There is a moment in the last act, after the mortally ill Mimi is brought back to the garret to die, wherein if I’ve heard it 500 times I have wept real tears 500 times. The forgiveness scene at the end of Figaro also affects me that way, as does the moment in Die Walkure when the doors blow open and moonlight pours in; if this one masterpiece off Puccini‘s workbench reaches me on that level, then Puccini can’t be all that bad.

Mozart can‘t be all that bad, either, but you may need to remind yourself of that after the Bowl concert two nights later. I’m sorry, but I just don‘t get what people see in Gerard Schwarz’s conducting, and probably never will. When I arrived in Los Angeles in 1980, he was leading the L.A. Chamber Orchestra on a downward path, betraying that ensemble‘s whole valuable purpose by taking on the symphonic repertory. In New York I heard Mostly Mozart programs led with no grace, no sense of the lovely rise and fall of the classical line in sovereign scores. From Seattle I hear recordings by Schwarz of bygone American symphonic repertory — conservative, lumbering pieces by George Chadwick, Howard Hanson, David Diamond — whose existence in our history probably justifies their place (but not by much). I remember the recordings Schwarz once made of old-timey trumpet and cornet repertory, two cherishable discs on Nonesuch that are worth your search. And I wonder why he abandoned that repertory, which still represents the best in his artistry.

At the Bowl he led Mozart, ending with the wonderful ”Linz“ Symphony, with its remarkable scoring for trumpets and horns buried in orchestral imbalance. A young pianist named Stewart Goodyear produced all the notes but came nowhere close to the passion and fantasy in the D-minor Piano Concerto. And if you didn’t think it possible to flatten out the grace and affection in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, that only means you weren‘t there that night. Through some curious circumstance that nobody at the Philharmonic has yet been able to explain, the program was given twice, on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Believe me, once was enough.

San Luis Obispo, known affectionately to its residents as ”SLO,“ has had its own Mozart Festival for 31 years. The genial and capable Clifton Swanson, who teaches conducting at Cal Poly — the town’s major school and its major industry as well — was the festival‘s co-founder and is still its musical bright light. I heard this summer’s opening concert: an early Mozart symphony, Beethoven‘s ”Eroica,“ and Frank Martin’s Concerto for Seven Wind Instruments, Percussion and Strings. I hear early Mozart all the time, especially if I stray too close to KUSC; the ”Eroica“ was still in my ears from the superb performance at the Hollywood Bowl a few days before; the Martinconcerto, therefore, stays with me the longest from that program. It called to mind an excellent composer (1890–1974) whom the world seems to be ignoring nowadays.

Martin was Swiss, and if you want to entertain images of clockwork and obsessive tidiness in connection with his music, you won‘t be far off. Karlheinz Stockhausen was one of his pupils, but your guess is as good as mine as to what that unruly visionary might have gleaned from this orderly, Calvinist neoclassicist. Martin’s most played work, at least in his lifetime, was the witty, charming Petite Symphonie Concertante of 1945; his most admired work currently — among those few who keep his name alive at all — is the oratorio Le Vin Herbe, a profound and intense setting of poetry about the Tristan and Isolde legend; it needs revival.

Despite its title, the SLO Mozart Festival‘s programming ranges far and wide, and the Martin concerto has been performed at least four times before this summer. Why not? It is a terrifically attractive piece; its exchanges among the solo instruments have a kind of Mozartian passion; its dissonances bristle but do not sting. At the end the timpani and percussion have their licks, and their outburst is both dazzling and hilarious. Overall, I felt myself really drawn to the piece; its interplay turns the entire orchestra into an argle-bargle through a wide emotional range. There was a good recording on Deutsche Grammophon by Thierry Fischer and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, which you might find in the used-disc shops; a recent one by Mathias Bamert isn’t quite as high-spirited.

The concert took place in the excellent acoustics of SLO‘s new Performing Arts Center on the Cal Poly campus, a masterwork of the Hideous-Moderne that looms over the town like a stranded spaceship. Other concerts are given in local churches, the SLO Mission and in less formal venues; over two weeks the whole area is immersed in serious music making. The orchestra is recruited partly from local folk, but draws on both Los Angeles and the Bay Area as well. (If you wonder what has happened to Ralph Morrison, who glares over the 110 freeway downtown in the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra mural but no longer plays in that orchestra, he’s the SLO Festival Orchestra‘s concertmaster.) Under Swanson’s strong direction, the Mozart Symphony No. 32 went like the wind; the ”Eroica“ was similarly brisk and shapely, but, as I was saying, my ears that night belonged to another. That afternoon one of the Cal Poly profs, Craig Russell by name, lectured on — no, actually, acted out — some of Beethoven‘s sketches for the ”Eroica“: falling on the floor to illustrate the changes to the ”wrong“ key, doing an Elektra triumphal dance at the final vanquishment of the D-flat invaders, that sort of thing. (Whatever happened to Robert Winter?)

Meanwhile, back at the Pass . . . Leila Josefowicz was reason enough to spend an evening at the Bowl the night before SLO’s opening concert; she had laid me low, along with all of London, with her performance of John Adams‘ Violin Concerto during his big weekend there last January. But this time she was up against a more formidable obstacle, that decrepit hulk of a once respectable musician named Jaime Laredo, who was listed as the evening’s conductor and also as Josefowicz‘s partner in glorious works from the past that involve two string instruments in profound conversation with each other and with the orchestra behind them.

In Bach’s D-minor Concerto for Two Violins, and in Mozart‘s E-flat Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola, the marvel is the depth and extent of those conversations, the tensions that build and then resolve as Violin One states a proposition, Violin Two (or Viola) answers but carries the argument forward by a subtle variation of the original line, and the orchestra comes in to refute or to praise what has just been said. In the Mozart especially, the depth of the discourse must move us all; the slow movement — which Mozart himself describes in a letter as ”a lovers’ dialogue“ — has always seemed to me the turning point in his own rise to expressive mastery. It is interesting, by the way, to compare Mozart‘s two historically adjacent works heard on successive classical concerts that week: the elegant, classically serene Two-Piano Concerto, No. 365 in Ludwig Kochel’s more or less chronological catalog, and this passionate, disturbing Sinfonia Concertante listed as K. 364.

Apparently, the evening‘s soloists chose different languages for their discourse on both K. 364 and the Bach Concerto: the sweet, beautifully contained yet human tones of Josefowicz’s violin against Laredo‘s groaning, self-indulgent overphrasing in both works — as if he had chosen on purpose to ignore everything his talented partner had to say. In between Bach and Mozart had come Mendelssohn’s ”Italian“ Symphony, conducted by Laredo also in an unwelcoming, thudding manner — with the prescribed repeats overlooked and the enchanting interplay between winds and strings made hoarse and drab. I once held Laredo‘s musicianship in reasonably high regard, but if this concert suggests the current level of that quality, I think it’s time to end inflicting himself — on the music and on us.

For better or for worse, director Benoit Jacquot has dealt with Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca — ”that shabby little shocker,“ in critic Joseph Kerman‘s immortal words — pretty much as the opera deserves. Nobody has ever mistaken the work for a subtle, life-size drama of heartbreak and redemption, and neither do Jacquot and his generally superior cast. The opera was designed for scenery chewing, eyeball popping and all the rest of the cornball melodrama vocabulary. If Puccini, and the playwright Victorien Sardou, whose stage drama served as source, didn’t design their respective Toscas from the first as high-pitched wide-screen surround-sound fodder, that can only be ascribed to the incidental fact that the medium was still in its infancy. You can say, therefore, that Jacquot‘s film of the opera elevates it to its rightful place.

Or might have, if it weren’t for various accompanying nuisances. Producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier, or so the handout goes, persuaded Jacquot to try his hand at Tosca even though, says Jacquot, ”Italian opera is not my cup of tea.“ Since du Plantier‘s escutcheon had already been soiled by the Joseph Losey Don Giovanni he produced in 1979 (a real mess of nuisances, including weird day-to-night lighting changes and hokey staging, plus cuts in that most uncuttable of scores), some of what goes wrong this time should probably be laid at his door.

There is, for one thing, a strange sense of distrust — of the medium of opera, or film, or both. Uncut, as here, Tosca runs a paltry two hours, yet its fluent course is continually intercut with segments of a ”making of“ black-and-white documentary: conductor Antonio Pappano wildly gesticulating during the recording session, surely more for the cameras than for the expert players of London’s Royal Opera House Orchestra, soloists and choristers in street clothes (a great saving in costume costs for the ”Te Deum“ scene). These interruptions document nothing; they merely intrude.

So does the curious practice — even, of all places, in the very pretty Act 1 love duet — of destroying vocal lines as singers move from song to orchestra-accompanied speech. So does the strange sense of visual disconnectedness, with some of the settings real (the three places in Rome where the action occurs), some of them rebuilt on sound stages (with Cavaradossi‘s completed painting — of a woman he’d only seen the day before! — billboard-size), some of them flashed in as a series of fuzzy photographs of places mentioned. Might this be the first-ever ”Annotated Tosca“?

Angela Gheorghiu is the Tosca, and she is spectacularly good — to hear and to see. She looks right, her dark eyes flashing love, jealousy and desperation. She sounds right, her voice a ravishing song of pain and ecstasy finished off with a dusky sheen that has opera nuts whispering ”Callas.“ What she manages most of all, in her scenes in the opera itself and even in the black-and-white backstage shots, is a projection that seems to merge Tosca‘s fire-etched passion and Gheorghiu’s own love of the act of performance. Her Cavaradossi, real-life husband Roberto Alagna, though reasonably fair of face and forthright of voice, is not quite her equal. She, for one thing, has the knack of looking as though she‘s singing even when lip-synched; he does not. Nor does the veteran (61) Ruggero Raimondi, the closed-mouth, stolid Scarpia.

Opera on film, even more than opera on video (which has its own problems), has its built-in, probably insurmountable drawbacks. One of the most basic is the fact that the human mouth when singing in close-up is simply not beautiful. (This should have been clear at least as far back as Ingmar Bergman’s Magic Flute.) I tire, after two hours, of watching Gheorghiu‘s dentition, no matter how nearly perfect; Alagna’s one out-of-line tooth up front; Raimondi‘s clenched jaws; even the orthodontia of James Savage-Hanford, who sings the Shepherd Boy in the last act. This filmed Tosca — not the first, by the way — is a pretty good job, if it’s filmed Tosca that you want. I‘ll stay with the stage versions, however, which bite cleaner, and deeper.

TOSCA | Directed by BENOIT JACQUOT | Music by GIACOMO PUCCINI | Libretto by GIUSEPPE GIACOSA and LUIGI ILLICA, from the play by VICTORIEN SARDOU | At Laemmle’s Music Hall, Laemmle‘s Playhouse 7