So I've Heard

At about 8:10 on the night of July 16, the sky above the Hollywood Bowl was dappled with small puffs of cloud, turned a soft pink in the rays of the setting sun. At the same moment, the sound came off the stage in similar puffs of string tone, dappled with flashes of audible light (also pink, if you wanted it to be) from a solo harp: a small piece called Guardian Angel by Karen Tanaka. This was music of great charm if no great consequence, but the coincidence of sight and sound turned into one of those moments — rare, alas — when music at the Bowl becomes like nothing else on Earth.

The Bowl season is upon us, and with it the usual outpouring of published wisdom as to why the place should be shut down or turned into condos and multiplexes. At the opening concert of the ”classical“ concert series two weeks ago, proclaimed as festive by the release of captive balloons but turned drab with an agonizing evening of Brahms inflicted upon the captive audience, it was easy enough for even the staunchest defender of these summer concerts to join the ranks of the naysayers. The music was soggy, the playing (under Paavo Jarvi, with Lars Vogt at the piano) coarse and self-indulgent. What kind of managerial thinking can it be to start off a season — indoor or outdoor, festive or routine — with the Brahms D-minor Piano Concerto, beginning as it does with the death howl of a wounded mastodon and ending on a similar note nearly an hour later?

But then came last week’s concert, turned noble not only by the sunset over Tanaka‘s pretty piece, but by some terrific music making under the Philharmonic’s new assistant conductor, Yasuo Shinozaki, whose praises I had sung once before when he took over Hans Vonk‘s scheduled Beethoven program during the winter season. This time Shinozaki conducted the Beethoven ”Eroica,“ and was joined by Emanuel Ax and his wife, Yoko Nozaki, in the unadulterated bliss of Mozart’s Two-Piano Concerto: a lot of E-flat major for one evening, but a notable concert on any level. In its own eloquent way, however, this event pointed up what could very well be wrong about the whole concept of these Bowl programs, at least the TuesdayThursday series that constitute the classical (once known as ”Symphonies Under the Stars“) side of the operation.

The plan — two programs a week under guest conductors, some of them previously unknown to the orchestra and most of them granted a mere three or four hours of rehearsal on the morning of the concert to make the acquaintance of the orchestra and make them acquainted with the music — is what is most wrong about the Bowl, far more so than the informal atmosphere, the picnicking and the copters overhead. The attendance may be paltry compared to the weekend programs of show tunes and fireworks, but it still often reaches two or three times the capacity of any indoor hall. It‘s a family crowd with plenty of youngsters, the very people the Philharmonic should be trying hardest to reach if it is ever going to supplant the Thursday-night and Friday-matinee walking dead during the winter season. For that reason, among many, these are the people who should be getting absolutely superb, involving, thrilling music making, on the level of the Salonen programs still to come, or on the level of Shinozaki’s Beethoven last week. That performance, by the way, drew cheers. Even at the maligned Bowl, some people can be counted on to know what they‘re hearing.

Shinozaki, 30, is a find. My spies in the orchestra tell me that he is well-liked and well-admired. His contract with the Philharmonic runs only another year; his career — concerts in his native Japan and also in Finland, where Salonen has been beating his drum — is nicely taking shape. He came to this one concert — why only one? — with the advantage over most of the season’s guest-conducting roster in that he knew the players and they him. That showed, even through the Bowl‘s still-primitive amplifying system; this was poised, eloquent playing, exuberant but well-mannered, and when the brass section took up for the last time the grand tune of the ”Eroica“ finale, you couldn’t help wanting to stand up and sing along.

What a work, that ”Eroica“! The best performances — and this was one — respond most of all to the incredible momentum of the piece, the rising dramatic curve that is differently shaped in each of the four movements, but produces each time a breathless tension. The first movement sounds that famous dissonance — an intruding C-sharp in an E-flat context — and requires an enormous time scale to set matters straight; we‘re something like 15 minutes into that movement before we even learn the full shape of the opening theme. The slow movement guides us to the brink of tragedy, shines an occasional shaft of C-major white light through the gloom, but ordains howls of pain from the trumpets as the music simply shatters, there in the thin, chill air. The finale takes us at first all the way back to Square One, and builds its new tune, one note at a time, from muttered fragments. The same thing happens, more famously, in the Ninth Symphony; here, in the Third, Beethoven had already achieved his mastery of music as drama. Eventually the finale achieves some kind of epiphany, with the last outpouring that — even more than the famous chorale in that other masterwork six symphonies later — sounds an anthem of redemption for all mankind.

The great performances send you home exhilarated, with nothing but the ”Eroica“ on your mind for hours and days to come. As I was saying, this was one.

The passing in recent weeks of Ralph Shapey (at 81) and Earle Brown (at 75) — strong-willed American composers, originals both, unalike in style but comparable in stature — inundated me in another wave of the nostalgia that is one of the more benevolent afflictions of old age. Musical New York in the 1960s — when both men were casting long shadows, and mine was considerably shorter — was wonderfully astir. New names carried new hopes: Pierre Boulez, Lincoln Center, the National Endowment. Every month, or so it seemed, there was something new from Shapey, most of it for small groups performing at the New School or Carnegie Recital Hall: bristling, fierce, ill-tempered pieces (like the man, who described himself as a ”radical traditionalist“). In 1969 he came to the conclusion that the world didn‘t deserve his music, and he withdrew it all from circulation in what turned out to be a seven-year embargo. There was lots of it on records at that time, however. Now thereisn’t nearly enough.

Earle Brown in those years was best known as a John Cage co-conspirator, part of that marvelous mutuality known as the New York School, in which composers and artists — Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Robert Rauschenberg — shared ideas and inventions. Brown‘s music had begun to circulate worldwide. In 1964, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic embarked on an ”Avant-Garde Festival“ with which neither he nor the orchestra was capable of coping; Brown’s Available Forms II, an ”open-form“ work using chance operations and two conductors, was on one program, cynically introduced by Bernstein and miserably performed. ”Mr. Bernstein tried everything short of a Flit gun to kill off the avant-garde movement in music . . .“ was the way I began my review in the (sob!) Herald-Tribune the next day.

Bernstein‘s Philharmonic had little to offer the cause of musical progress, as did the other components of the slick supermarket for the arts that Lincoln Center soon became. (After Boulez acceded to Bernstein’s podium, his most adventurous programming took place when he moved the performances to other, less formal venues in the Village and elsewhere.) Shapey had come to New York (from his native Philadelphia) in 1945; like Brown, he fell in with the forward-moving crowd that included artists as well as musicians; Willem de Kooning was a close friend. So was Stefan Wolpe, the expatriate self-willed iconoclast who took Schoenberg‘s 12-tone methods into strange, intensely emotional regions.

Shapey’s music from the start seemed to reflect that same combination of high passion and harmonic abstruseness. The music I most remember from those years was pretty scary stuff, jabbing and restless, with a powerful oratorical sense, especially in the music he wrote to celebrate the Israeli nationhood. Later on he moved to Chicago, where for his last 27 years he led a chamber ensemble devoted to new music, and taught composition — memorably, according to students I‘ve spoken to. He never lost the power to make waves.

That was conclusively proved in 1992, and it spawned a tidal wave of responses and commentaries in newspapers throughout the country. The Pulitzer Prize music jury — George Perle, Roger Reynolds and Harvey Sollberger — unanimously chose Shapey’s Concerto Fantastique for that year‘s award. However, the Pulitzer board rejected that recommendation, choosing instead the jury’s second choice, The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark by Wayne Peterson — whom you‘ve never since heard of, and neither have I. The music jury responded with a public statement avowing that they had not been consulted and that the board was not professionally qualified to make such a decision. The board responded that ”The Pulitzers are enhanced by having, in addition to the professional’s point of view, the layman‘s or consumer’s point of view.“ The board did not rescind its decision.

(You can, if you wish, invoke that event to date the start of the whole dumbing-down process that has now spread through the classical-music industry. It was recently manifested at the Hollywood Bowl, by the way, when John Williams led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in what was listed — and described in program notes — as Copland‘s Lincoln Portrait but which actually consisted of only the last five minutes of that 15-minute piece.)

Brown, already a strong-minded, innovative composer with a background as well in jazz and mathematics, was invited by Cage to join the New York circle in 1952. Jackson Pollock’s painting methods had also been an early influence; throughout his career, Brown worked in a complex of attitudes toward musical freedom vs. musical discipline. Like Cage, he became fascinated with alternative forms of musical notation; both men produced manuscripts that deserve regard as artworks in themselves. Unlike some of Cage‘s works, however, Brown’s musical notation — squares, graphs, squiggles and actual notes — gave the performers specific information about pitch and rhythm, as well as information about when to ignore that kind of information and take off on their own.

Everything fascinated him. As a teenager he fell in love with Charles Ives‘ Concord Sonata and wore out the one copy available at the local shop; studying engineering and math at college in Boston, he played trumpet with big bands on weekends and later befriended the legendary Zoot Sims. Every early experience seemed to find its place in his own art later on: the Abstract Expressionist painters, Merce Cunningham’s choreography, Gertrude Stein‘s poetry, Henri Bergson’s philosophy. In 1980 he was at CalArts — for one of several visits — and oversaw a performance of his Calder Piece, extraordinary pan-sensual music for percussionists beating the bejesus out of 100 instruments that included a sculpture created by Calder for the occasion. Hearing it contributed to my own decision to remain in California.

If Cage‘s impact on the avant-garde community was basically philosophical, Brown seemed to recognize the need for contact with the outside world. To this end he founded the remarkable if short-lived label Time-Mainstream, whose 18 LPs gave American record buyers their first hearings of the music of the new Europeans Nono, Maderna, Kagel and Boulez, along with several Americans, in definitive performances. As president of the Fromm Music Foundation, he commissioned works by almost every major American composer you’d want to name.

Skier, tennis whiz, aviation buff, collector of Porsches and first editions of Gertrude Stein, Earle Brown remained restless and joyous, even as poor health clouded his last few years. As with Shapey, too little of his music is readily at hand: a piano collection on New Albion and a valuable disc on Newport Classic covering 25 years of music for small ensemble — elegant, iridescent, not immediately friendly but generous at repaying the effort. Conflict note: I wrote the program booklet. But I didn‘t write the music.

Clouds of gloom thicken around the classical-music landscape, and around classical recording most of all. The major labels have so cut back their activities in this area that the few important releases in recent months — Simon Rattle’s Gurrelieder on EMI, say, or Martha Argerich‘s Schumann (of which more later) or the Emersons’ set of the Shostakovich quartets on DG — seem more like lucky accidents than evidence of an ongoing caring about the serious repertory. Only the smaller labels — ECM, Nonesuch, Bridge, New Albion — operate as if such caring were still possible; I note with pleasure that none of those labels include in their catalogs such redundancies as yet another Beethoven Nine.

The future is bleak, but the past survives gloriously. The remarkable Naxos label, which began life as a purveyor of standard repertory in bargain-basement performances at bargain-basement prices, now devotes a fair portion of its monthly releases to reissues of old repertory, some from the very dawn of electrical recording. The basic Naxos price has moved up a couple of notches — to $7.99 from an initial $5.99 — but the stuff available in its ”historical“ catalog is truly remarkable. Recent releases include several concertos by the legendary (and much revered) British pianist who went under the single name of Solomon: the Tchaikovsky First, the Beethoven Third, a not-all-that-dreary effort by Sir Arthur Bliss, along with Solomon‘s performance of the F-minor Fantasy that may be my all-time favorite recorded Chopin. On Naxos, too, there is a garland of lighter stuff: two whole discs of Britain’s beloved belter Gracie Fields, a disc of the real Ivor Novello to fill you in on the character in Gosford Park, and, best of all, a disc by the Comedian Harmonists, the mythic German vocal group disbanded by Hitler. Until you‘ve heard the Harmonists in their all-vocal rendition of the Barber of Seville Overture, your musical education is not yet complete.

On Naxos, too, there are operas: the first generation of complete electrical recordings turned out in Italian recording studios around 1930 under the workmanlike leadership of the likes of Lorenzo Molajoli and Carlo Sabajno, remarkably restored by another of music’s authentic heroes, the blind American tonmeister Ward Marston, whose program notes describing his ”rescues“ of ancient sounds imprisoned on scratchy old 78-rpm discs read like tales of high adventure.

I spent an evening recently with two sets of Verdi‘s Il Trovatore: the new Sony release from La Scala, apparently rushed out because its tenor, Salvatore Licitra, is the ”hot“ new guy who stood in for Pavarotti at the Met a few weeks ago; and the Naxos set from La Scala in 1930 whose tenor, Francesco Merli, had a solid if unremarkable career in several houses here and abroad. The two performances, recorded quality aside, sound like two completely different operas. Here is Merli battering his way through ”Di quella pira,“ holding onto the high notes like there’s no tomorrow (but transposing the aria down to B from the written C), the voice a thing of sweat and gristle and even, for all anyone can tell, a few spurts of blood; Molajoli‘s orchestra stumbling and wheezing, with the chorus off in, perhaps, Sardinia.

This is the old, traditional Verdi of the people’s theater, and maybe anyone who tried that style today would be booed off the stage. What we have instead is the admirably correct young Licitra, in C major as written, joined by Riccardo Muti‘s orchestra in all the notes that Verdi wrote and none that he didn’t. The new performance sounds good and probably is good, but there is something that pours off that ancient Naxos set — and the Ballo in Maschera with Beniamino Gigli, and the Forza del Destino with nobody in particular — that may deny us the dimension of digital stereo recording but adds another unwritten dimension that, I contend, belongs to Verdi‘s music along with all those correct notes. And this, I remind you, at eight bucks a shot.

For quite a few dollars more, there is Andante.com and its growing ”boutique“ of reissues — a serendipitous assemblage of bygone recordings and radio broadcasts — nicely packaged in three- or four-disc albums at $18 per disc, available through the Internet. Again, as with Naxos’ Verdi, some of the interest here is the preservation of bygone performance attitudes: depressingly bloated Bach performances under Willem Mengelberg, Leopold Stokowski and Serge Koussevitzky, framed by performances under Adolf Busch (with Rudolf Serkin at the piano) that represent early stirrings of the move toward historically informed musicianship. Another set, of performances by the mercurial Mengelberg and his Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, is a trove of ecstatic overstatement — the greatest Les Preludes ever, with the Concertgebouw Orchestra‘s 1929 brass section storming the heavens; the Tchaikovsky Fifth with blatant cuts in the finale that actually improve that sprawling movement. Ernest Bloch’s music, teetering these days on the brink of obscurity, is handsomely remembered in two separate sets: the Violin Concerto in a collection of Joseph Szigeti performances and the Piano Quintet in an album celebrating the legendary Pro Arte String Quartet, with the great Alfredo Casella as pianist in this one work.

Some of the choices are, let‘s say, strange; a Stravinsky-led set includes the wobbly, watery Paris recordings (Les Noces, Pulcinella, the Octet) that he would redo in better sound later on. A set from the Vienna Philharmonic wastes two discs on a 1957 Herbert von Karajan Bruckner Eighth to join his three performances already available. A ”Schubert Chamber Music“ set doesn’t contain a single string quartet. Most curious is a Schumann miscellany that includes two oddly mannered performances of Carnaval (Serge Rachmaninoff and Leopold Godowsky), Alfred Cortot‘s immensely poetic Papillons, and a preponderance of the playing of lesser Schumanniacs Claudio Arrau and Yves Nat.

Better than any of the above is a wonderful Schumann program on a new EMI disc preserving a concert that took place in Nijmigen, the Netherlands, in 1994, involving Martha Argerich and several instrumentalists in a heart-to-heart program. It includes the Piano Quintet, the B-flat Variations and other chamber works. Argerich is, of course, the enkindling spirit, and it burns bright on this occasion. The peculiar mix of fantasy and benevolent discipline, which shines forth in the Piano Quintet above all of Schumann’s instrumental music, is exactly mirrored in the Argerich sensibility — here, and in her other recorded Schumann. As with those old opera singers transfigured by Verdi, Argerich and Schumann come together in an annealing fire.

Tchaikovsky here, Turandot there: The music season soared toward its final days at full volume, on grand, swooping wings. At the close, however, there was exquisite quietude. Sitting last weekend in the courtyard of that architectural wonder, the Rudolf Schindler house in West Hollywood, with Schindler’s stark, simple structural lines dwarfed by trees and tall bamboo, you could imagine yourself in some remote, moonlit forest, with the sounds of John Cage‘s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano resounding like a gamelan off in the next village.

I am not always sure that listening to Cage’s music is the best way to grasp his unique and important art. There are times when the sounds that emerge from, say, packing boxes lightly tapped, or carrots in a food processor, or a solo violin playing music so convoluted that Cage himself needed a computer to explain it — ”the sound of lettuce wilting,“ said a friend, of the Freeman Etudes — are less enchanting in themselves than the pronouncements of the man who demanded their place in the musical firmament. Yet there is a body of music from Cage‘s 50-plus years as music’s irritant and guiding spirit that is simply, directly and truly beautiful, and this hourlong set from the early years (1946–48) — a single monument formed out of 20 small, lapidary, perfectly formed pieces — hung in the night air at Schindler like an epiphany, a benevolence. James Tenney, a onetime Cage disciple and now at CalArts, preceded his elegant performance with Cage‘s most famous single piece, the 4’33” — not a silent work, as some believe, but a work for silent pianist and the surrounding audible ambiance. The repertory of “involuntary” sounds this time included a crying baby and a Spanish-language TV close by and a small plane up above — a foretaste of the Hollywood Bowl concerts that kick off a new music season as you read these words.

By the most common measurements, the mix this season has been the usual hope, revelation and exasperation. Under its new artistic management, the Los Angeles Opera was stunningly reborn in early September: reborn in the orchestra pit under Valery Gergiev and — a couple of days delayed by 911 — the company‘s new principal conductor, Kent Nagano; reborn in repertory — finally a Russian opera, Wagner, Schoenberg, even Bach; reborn in newly funded security resting in part upon Albert Vilar’s zillions. Not everything went as planned, of course; it never does. Reports of Vilar‘s dwindling fortunes continue to circulate; the pie-in-the-sky George Lucas– designed Ring, originally slated for next year, has been put off until Wotan knows when; the 2002-03 season is upon us without a sure director announced for either opening or closing nights. Still, the splendid Nagano-led performances — Lohengrin, the Berlin visitors with Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, and the closing BartokPuccini double bill — were enough to offset Achim Freyer‘s lurid misconception of Bach’s B-minor Mass, or the wretched pairs of principals that made it impossible to judge the new ending Luciano Berio had fashioned for Nagano‘sTurandot.

The Opera’s Moses und Aron was actually the season‘s major Schoenberg event, even though the anniversary celebration (50 years dead) was nominally motivated by the Philharmonic. That visionary organization, however, backed away from the grittier atonal repertory (Erwartung, for example, or the Variations for Orchestra, the Violin Concerto or larger chamber works like the Serenade) and wasted everybody’s time with the hopeless early Pelleas und Melisande. The best of the Philharmonic‘s Schoenberg celebration was actually the Green Umbrella concert, culminating in Esa-Pekka Salonen’s rapturous reading of the First Chamber Symphony. The concomitant Shostakovich event, which promises all 15 symphonies, under Salonen, is likely — strange to relate — to prove more revelatory. It will be interesting to note Salonen‘s take next season on the Fifth (May 2), which he once swore to conduct only over his own dead body.

Three string quartets visiting the County Museum’s Monday Evening series brought strong programs and played them beautifully: the Parisii with Schoenberg‘s Third Quartet, the Artemis and Penderecki with each of Ligeti’s two quartets apiece, the Penderecki also with the deep, convoluted, elegant Second Quartet of Szymanowski, which I must get to know better. Jeff Kahane‘s L.A. Chamber Orchestra delivered the best performance of a Haydn Symphony (No. 102) that I’ve heard in years, and the soloist that night was the astonishing Thomas Quasthoff. I followed that program from Glendale‘s Alex Theater to Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall and was delighted by the performance level both times. (Before you get ready to look down your nose at this summer‘s Bowl programs, note that Quasthoff is due to sing Mahler there, with Salonen and the Philharmonic, on August 13.)

And next season? An amazing tome dropped on my desk last week, listing upcoming events at UCLA — at Royce Hall, Schoenberg Hall and points in between. After a couple of so-so seasons, the school’s Performing Arts Department seems to have zoomed into orbit, with a phenomenal agenda that includes theater — a Robert Wilson–directed Woyzeck (!) with Tom Waits‘ music (December 4) — dance galore and a fabulous musical array. From a quick glance at promised music, I noted a recital (October 9) by the powerful mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (who will also sing in John Adams’ El Niño with the Philharmonic in March), the superb American conductor David Robertson (Santa Monica–born) leading his Orchestre National de Lyon (February 2), the new Steve Reich–Beryl Korot multimedia work (February 27-28), and both Bach passions (April 4-5) with Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium–Japan, whose fame already approaches legendary status.

Will this leave time to cruise down to Costa Mesa when the Eclectic Orange Festival comes up with Osvaldo Golijov‘s Pasion Segun San Marco in October? Or to the L.A. Opera’s War and Peace later that month? Or the Master Chorale (also reborn under Grant Gershon‘s leadership) singing Poulenc, Gorecki and Arvo Part in the newly consecrated Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in November? Or Reich’s spellbinding The Desert Music later in the season? Or Pierre Boulez and Mitsuko Uchida at the Philharmonic‘s final Dorothy Chandler Pavilion subscription concert in May? Or their visit the following week to the Ojai Festival?

Ho-hum, a well-known local critic once remarked; nothing ever happens in this cultural desert of a plastic lotus of a La-La Land. And where is he now?

Sir Donald Francis Tovey changed my life — for the better, I like to think.

I was 20, as hapless a premed as ever walked along ivied walls. Somebody in physics lab showed me a slim volume he‘d just acquired: Essays in Musical Analysis by Sir Donald Francis Tovey. The title was forbidding; the prose was warm, welcoming and congenial. They weren’t ”musical analyses“ as I understood the term — first movement in the tonic, modulating to the dominant via enharmonic bridge, etc. They were, instead, program notes about specific pieces that Sir Donald would conduct with his Reid Orchestra in Edinburgh. ”This is what I plan to conduct,“ they told his good Scots readers, ”and these are my thoughts to take the music closer.“ In my friend‘s book (one volume of a set of six), I read about Antonin Dvorak’s particular kind of sublimity, ”which trails clouds of glory not only with the outlook of the child but with the solemnity of the kitten running after its tail.“ I read about one of the crabby tunes in the Cesar Franck Symphony ”striding grandly, in its white confirmation dress.“ I read, spellbound, through 45 pages of glowing, adoring prose about why Beethoven‘s Ninth Symphony is what it is. This, I decided, is what I want to do, and to hell with ”my son the doctor.“

What Tovey wrote about was not only the structure of a piece of music; his focus was on the aura that forms in and around a piece of music after it leaves the printed page and makes contact with the listener out front. His ideal listener, he proclaimed time and again, was the person not necessarily trained in music, but endowed with a willing ear to accept a musical experience and examine the results. He enlisted the dangerous allies of simile and metaphor to make and to illustrate his points, but he used them as convincingly as any writer about music before or since his time, including — dare I say it? — our own Lenny. To my dying day, perhaps beyond, I will not get past a certain spot in the Beethoven Ninth without hearing Tovey’s ”flashes of red light“ from the trumpets. They‘re there.

And now, 62 years after Tovey’s death, he is with us again in astonishing plenitude, in The Classics of Music, a volume huge in girth (864 pages) and in price ($95), a treasury of never-before-published Tovey: more Essays in Musical Analysis, formal lectures, radio talks, reviews, even an account of a newfangled piano that could play quarter-tones. An editor at Oxford University Press, Michael Tilmouth, persuaded the Tovey archive at the University of Edinburgh to make its contents available for publication; after Tilmouth‘s death, his work was completed by David Kimbell and Roger Savage. The result is a compendium so wise, so friendly, so essential as to heap further disgrace on the sorry pile that has in recent years come to clutter the far corner of my worktable — ghastly small tomes with titles like Who’s Afraid of Classical Music, or Getting Opera. On every page, amid essays on Haydn Quartets, Mozart arias and Tovey‘s own piano concerto, amid a set of Beethoven lectures and another set with the prickly title ”Music in Being,“ and a broadcast talk called ”Music and the Ordinary Listener,“ Tovey’s importance lies in his wise love of his art and his uncanny skill at sharing it.

Tovey (1875–1940) composed, and enjoyed a fair career as a pianist. His A-major Piano Concerto (available on Hyperion) isn‘t a bad academic exercise, and there’s a clarinet sonata that‘s even prettier. By 1905 his writing career had taken hold, and he was asked to contribute major articles — including one, extraordinary, called ”Music“ — to the great 11th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. These have been published by Oxford from time to time but are probably no longer easy to find. (The good news here is that the entire 11th Britannica is now available for download: www.1911encyclopedia.org.)

From Tovey I learned to bear blatant prejudices as a badge of honor. The violinist Joseph Joachim was his close friend, and certainly shaped Tovey’s strong bias toward the music of Brahms and, consequently, away from the Wagnerian camp. On a single page among the ”Essays,“ Tovey manages to demolish the whole line — Wagner to Bruckner to Mahler — with a couple of pen strokes. There follow eight pages of kindly encomium vested upon two orchestral ”poems“ — The Riders of the Sidhe and Springtime on Tweed — by a certain William Beatton Moonie, on whom obscurity has cast its pall. Then come some 30 pages of exquisite insights into the inner workings of a sheaf of Mozart works in which at least two — the last piano concerto and the violinviola concertante — are dealt with briefly but with heartwarming insight; ”galloping at his laziest,“ we read, ”Mozart never allows his square rhythms to fall into monotony.“

Tovey the critic fought the same battles that we fight today, with only the names changed. Before the legendary Arthur Nikisch, the glam conductor of his time, Tovey stands forth in mingled admiration and horror: ”a splendid interpreter of all that is obviously dramatic, his mind is almost a blank on matters of quiet poetic intensity of feeling.“ He wrestles mightily with the looming specter of the upstart Richard Strauss. ”There is nothing unusual,“ he grieves, upon the advent of Ein Heldenleben, ”in the spectacle of a man of genius associating his own finest art with all that is pretentious and undignified.“

As befalls every observer of the cultural scene, Tovey witnessed an occasional cloud across his crystal ball. Visiting the inventor Emanuel Moor to observe the ”duplex-coupler“ piano that could switch between tunings, Tovey ventured the prophecy that ”the ordinary pianoforte will be extinct as the Dodo in ten years.“ On the other hand, a report on the problems of maintaining a symphony orchestra (his own Edinburgh ensemble) — funding, adequate rehearsal time, the livelihood of the players — might have appeared in yesterday‘s headlines.

So, for that matter, could the very spirit that infuses this remarkable, indispensable, unaffordable musical ”witness for the defense“ (his words). The introduction to the first volume of Tovey’s Essays, the book that caused my pathway to swerve nearly six decades ago, ends with a statement of faith: ”While the listener must not expect to hear the whole contents of a piece of music at once, nothing concerns him that will not ultimately reach his ear either as a directly audible fact or as a cumulative satisfaction in things of which the hidden foundations are well and truly laid.“ Funny, but I still believe that.

IT HAPPENED AGAIN. TWO WEEKENDS AGO, while the Los Angeles Opera was showing off the buying power of million-dollar budgets in its oversize Music Center playground, a few miles to the south there was the Long Beach Opera, the little company that could, demonstrating with equal impact — in a college auditorium a third the size of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion — the superior power of brains over brawn. That’s the dichotomy — David vs. Goliath, Mutt vs. Jeff, whatever — that enlivens the operatic scene hereabouts.

This year’s Long Beach opera was Jenufa, Leos Janácek’s 1903 weeper firmly rooted in the category of masterpieces too seldom broached; in anyone’s memory this may, indeed, have been the opera’s first professional staging in Southern California. The performance was recognizably Long Beach. The young, attractive lead singers, and the veterans in the character roles as well, behaved as if they were actually singing and listening to one another. (Compare this to the leads in the L.A. Opera’s Turandot, mostly engaged in serenading the second balcony.) Isabel Milenski (daughter of Michael, the company’s founder and general director) made intelligent use of the single, spacious set to create a forced perspective in tune with the sense of the plot. The sounds from the pit may have overpowered the singers from time to time, but the orchestral accents seemed very much in tune with Janácek’s own hard-edged, folklike, subtle language. On the way out I stopped, as I usually do, to arrange a return visit.

Call it experimental, call it conceptual, deconstructive or simply off-the-wall, the Long Beach Opera has in its 24 years learned to walk tightropes and hover on brinks of chasms unique among American companies. The very unpredictability of its offerings has earned it label acceptance. Walk out of an L.A. Opera performance and you’re bound to hear somebody grumbling about not renewing next year. Walk out of a Long Beach performance, in the company’s current home at the Carpenter Center at Cal State Long Beach, and the first thing you sense is a kind of wonderment mixed with delight.

Wonderment: It comes in all shapes and sizes at Long Beach. At the recent Jenufa, part of the novelty was that the production was actually set in the time and place — rural Bohemia circa 1890 — specified in the score. Compare that with last year’s Elektra, with Richard Strauss’ loudmouthed dysfunctionals transported from ancient Crete to a beach house in, maybe, Malibu. Or with the 1999 Bluebeard’s Castle, set not in the L.A. Opera’s recent murky grotto but in a well-lit but seedy urban tenement. Or with the 1986 Tales of Hoffmann, relocated in a druggie den in Manhattan’s East Village.

To these adventurous heights the Long Beach Opera has ascended in slow and easy stages. Michael Milenski produced his first opera, Madama Butterfly, at 13, back home in Cortez, Colorado, and “knew from then on that that was what I wanted to do. Even my high school yearbook predicted I would end up directing the fleas in a circus.” He almost fulfilled that prophecy, in fact, landing a job after college as part of the apprenticeship network backstage at the San Francisco Opera, “driving a truck, typing and helping to put opera performances onto a stage.” From San Francisco, Milenski moved southward, where he collaborated with the San Jose Symphony on several operatic stagings.

Long Beach beckoned; a few civic leaders had, by the mid-1970s, sensed the value in some homegrown culture. After a few seasons of square opera for the folks of squaresville, however, it was time to face more distant horizons. In San Jose, Milenski had worked with a pair of iconoclastic stage directors who also happened to be twin brothers: Christopher and David Alden. In 1981, Christopher Alden came aboard as Long Beach’s director of production. The association bore its first fruit two years later; Alden’s production of Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice, done in the small Center Theater in downtown Long Beach with almost no scenery but copious imagination, counts as the rebirth of the company. Both Aldens have used Long Beach to try out their brand of operatic hip, usually to excellent advantage. David returns next year to direct Handel’s Ariadne in Crete. You’ve never heard of it? Neither have I.

IN THE RUSTIC STUDIO BEHIND THE RAMbling Long Beach home that serves as office, Milenski, 60 — lightly bearded in the Don Johnson manner, his words a rich baritone that might serve as Oracle in some baroque fantasy — reminisces about financial crises, lousy reviews, diva walkouts: the usual hair shirt worn by opera impresarios the world over. He speaks confidently of another 25 years and then another. He describes the Long Beach Opera phenomenon as a kind of chain reaction.

“Choosing a repertory is actually fairly easy. We look at each other, think it’s weird, and then think it’s right. Roy Rallo, who began with us carrying coffee, directed the Bluebeard three years ago, and then he came to me with the idea of doing Elektra, which somehow seemed feasible. I’d never have done Jenufa if we hadn’t made good with Elektra; they’re both from about the same period, after all. It’s right for us to do Janácek operas; I felt ripped off when the L.A. Opera did The Makropoulos Case, because we could have done it so much better. The difference is between an opera that becomes one of nine in a big company’s season, and one of one when we can really focus on it. I wish we were doing The Flying Dutchman instead of L.A., because that’s the kind of story we can tell really well. The big companies are better off with Lohengrin or the Ring.”

Lisa Willson was the Jenufa, in a performance especially remarkable for her naturalness as a country girl in love but in trouble. Daniel Cafiero was the Steva, who had gotten her into the trouble; Roy Cornelius Smith was the loving Laca, who marries her anyway. All of them were new to Long Beach. Where did they come from?

“When you’ve been around as long as Long Beach Opera,” Milenski responds, “you’ve got spies. Rich Cordova, who conducted here in 1985, knew that I was looking for the right Jenufa for our stage, young and beautiful and able to act as well as sing. She and Rich were working in an Ariadne auf Naxos in Sarasota, so I flew down to Florida and there she was. We’re in good standing with the Herbert Barrett office in New York, one of the top concert managers; there’s always someone there who digs the kind of stuff we do, and so he found us the ideal Steva. Then somebody at Barrett remembered a young tenor in Chicago, so we got him on a plane at 7 p.m., and at 9:45 we got him into a rehearsal studio in New York — had to kick out a yoga class to make room — and I had my Laca.

“We also got our conductor, Andreas Mitisek, through the spy system. Peter Kazaras, who was in our Eugene Onegin years ago, met a young conductor in Vienna who had started an opera theater that was a lot like ours, and Peter got us together. Andreas and I found we shared a lot of the same thought process. Besides, he was willing to take on our Indian Queen — Purcell in a high-camp mariachi festival, as over-the-top as anything we’ve ever done. Jenufa was his fifth production for us, so we now think of him as part of the mix. We don’t agree on everything, of course; he likes Stravinsky, which I can’t abide. But we get along.”

One other thing Milenski talks of as not abiding is the current passion for supertitles to guide readers through the plots — even when the opera is in English. “There’s a constant struggle — word versus music. We do almost all our operas in English, and the ability to sing clear English is one of our criteria in casting. Why should you glue your attention on every single word ticker-taping across above the stage, when your real response should be what the music is doing with and to those words? That, after all, is what opera is about . . . or should be.”

The on-again, off-again romance between the Los Angeles Opera and the other local industry — which sagged a while back as Hollywood’s Bruce Beresford turned Rigoletto into a lumpy hash — has now moved forward a couple of notches. William Friedkin‘s take on the double bill of one-acters currently at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion — running in repertory with Turandot, both offerings ending this weekend — may contain a trick or two too many, but the entertainment value overall is high. I had a good time there, and so should you.

It’s a strange pairing, Bartok‘s dark, restless psychodrama about the tormented Bluebeard and his latest wife, and Puccini’s delirious fleshing-out of Dante‘s mendacious rogue of a Gianni Schicchi. Friedkin has devised a hilarious sight gag to link the two. One of the ectoplasms of Bluebeard’s former wives — uninhabited airborne nighties right out of Disneyland‘s Haunted House — stays on past intermission as the dying Buoso Donati gives up the ghost at the start of Puccini’s opera. To end the Bartok, Friedkin has another marvelous device: As the bride Judith takes her place among the ghosts of the past, Bluebeard comes on the scene one more time with yet another bride. Life goes on, and so does death.

Gottfried Pilz‘s set for Duke Bluebeard’s Castle — a handsome spiral staircase and a collapsed chandelier that resembles a tarantula about to strike — serves the Gianni Schicchi as well, the staircase framing a view of Dante‘s Florence (with Giotto’s campanile still abuilding even though the costuming is more up-to-date) and the chandelier now properly hung. (Another built-in coincidence: The Bartok begins, and the Puccini ends, with spoken exhortations meant by each composer to be delivered in the language of the audience.)

Samuel Ramey‘s performances in the title roles of both operas greatly strengthen the coupling, as does Kent Nagano’s splendid musical leadership. Bartok‘s score grows in my own esteem; it has gradually made its way into the repertory, with recent performances hereabouts by the Long Beach Opera (set in a seedy urban tenement) and by Pierre Boulez and the Philharmonic in concert form. It is full of gorgeous musical events, even when its elements do not entirely fuse. By 1911 Bartok had come to share in the widespread (if not unanimous) adoration of Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande; the declamation in his own opera — particularly the way the very shape of the vocal lines defines the conflicting personalities of its two characters — confirms his debt to the nine-years-older work. There is Debussy, too, in the surging orchestration, mingled with Bartok‘s growing mastery over the harsh, bright colors of his own Eastern European background. Ramey and Nagano, each in his own way, seemed wonderfully at home in both the verbal and musical language of this extraordinary work; less so Denyce Graves, who made nice sounds as the doomed Judith but had a way of making the language itself both flat and harsh.

The Gianni Schicchi — Puccini for people who don’t like Puccini — might have done with fewer pratfalls. Against the cavorting, galumphing Rinuccio of Rolando Villazon — hardly worthy of the Lauretta (Danielle De Niese) who had sung ”O mio babbino caro“ so prettily — there was Ramey‘s comic, beautifully modulated Schicchi. The excessive biz aside, Friedkin did a fine job in welding together a delightful unit. Among them, as the dowager Zita, there was of all people the veteran Rosalind Elias, 50-plus years into her singing career and no less lively now than when I heard her at the Met in the 1950s. Life, indeed, goes on.

Since I had felt that the first principals in the company’s new Turandot had somewhat compromised the production, and especially Luciano Berio‘s much-touted new ending for Puccini’s unfinished score, I stopped by last weekend to see if the second team might have done better. Different, perhaps, but hardly better: not so much the lurch ‘n’ clutch of the first night‘s Audrey Stottler and Franco Farina; now the gasp ‘n‘ gargle of Nina Warren and Ian De Nolfo. Lordy, what sheer out-of-focus vocal ugliness expended on such promising dramatic substance! Again the Liu, also new this time, stole the show: Svetla Vassileva, small and utterly winning. I begin to suspect that this one role, above all else in an imperfect but potentially stirring opera, has the show-stealing capacity built in.

Thus ended the first year of the L.A. Opera as conceived and planned by Placido Domingo. Beyond question, it has been a step forward in repertory: the company’s first Russian opera, its first truly distinguished Wagner, a timid but commendable handshake to Schoenberg, the present double bill. Even some of the mistakes had their noteworthy sides: The hideous staging of Bach‘s B-minor Mass at least brought the legendary Achim Freyer to town, and the blatantly misconceived and bloated Merry Widow had its blameless side in Rodney Gilfry’s Danilo. The new connection with Berio could be significant; it will prove more so if it brings us some of his own past operatic successes, most of all Il Re in Ascolto, one of the great, wise, truly beautiful stage works of the past half-century.

There are problems on the horizon. One worries that too much hope has been pinned to the deep pockets of superpatron Alberto Vilar, in view of his own famous capriciousness, not to mention the uncertainty of the market since 911. The promised Lucas-designed Ring, which sounded too good to be true when it was first announced for 2003, now appears to be just that; the announcement of its delay (to 2006, was it?) came with the kind of backing-and-filling double talk that always sows distrust. Marta Domingo continues to cast her diminutive shadow; she will stage next season‘s Tales of Hoffmann, which will, at least, use Michael Kaye’s interesting new edition last seen here in 1988. If I had to pinpoint the most horrible operatic experience from the past season, it would be Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari‘s Sly, which the Metropolitan Opera dug out for Domingo: depressingly low-grade music, stupidly staged (by Marta Domingo) without even the most rudimentary sense of blocking or dramatic design. Does it loom on our horizon? Our only safeguard is that the winds generally blow from west to east.

Still, the more immediate horizon has Monteverdi’s Poppea to offer (again, in a Berio reworking), and our first-ever look at Prokofiev‘s War and Peace, with Russian performing forces by the gazillion occupying the territory at First and Grand, financed by Vilar and marshaled under Valery Gergiev’s baton. To start off, there‘s more Puccini, his Girl of the Golden West too long away, with the very promising Simone Young on the podium and Domingo as ”Meester Johnson of Sacramento.“ It couldn’t be all bad.

The story of Terezin‘s music is well known: Hitler’s Nazis maintaining this one prison camp — Theresienstadt in German, Terezin in its native Czech — as a cultural showcase, composers and other artistic spirits encouraged to create and perform for a time and then dragged off to the killing chambers at Auschwitz. Some of the Terezin music was smuggled out in manuscript, survived, and has now been published, performed and recorded. It has also, of course, been celebrated in many Holocaust observances, but this has sometimes had the effect of reducing the actual stature of the music to sentimental objects that must be loved and honored for their very existence. I confess that I have on occasion been led to look on the Terezin repertory in this way — until the amazing Wednesday-night concert that began last week‘s 56th annual Ojai Music Festival.

That event was a “marathon” piano recital by the formidable Marino Formenti: four hours of astonishing music astonishingly played, ranging from Beethoven at 8 o’clock, Schubert shortly afterward, through three works from the Terezin repertory, to the 80 minutes of Morton Feldman‘s For Bunita Marcus, the airy mix of notes (few) and silences (many) that sent the exhausted crowd home shortly after midnight. The concert took place in the cramped precincts of Ojai’s Art Center; of the capacity crowd of 180 or so, perhaps half a dozen walked out during the Feldman. Formenti later reported that when he played the work in Vienna a smaller percentage left before the end. “But there were only 35 people there at the start,” he explained.

Two of the three Terezin works, the Sonata by Gideon Klein and the Sixth Sonata by Viktor Ullmann, were actually composed during imprisonment; Pavel Haas‘ Opus 13 Suite had been published a few years before its composer was sent to the camp. All three works were strong, forceful, beautifully shaped and teeming with imagination. Formenti performed them for what they were, not relics but real music. Hearing them played this way — the mingling of violence and sardonic humor in Ullmann’s Sonata, the clear and radiant slow movement of the Klein — it suddenly hit me that this music marked a point of termination in more ways than one. It was music whose composers were to be shortly marked for death. It was music whose style had also come to a deadly, if not dead, end.

That style is a dense, contrapuntal manner, still within the bounds of tonality but drawing a spiritual restlessness from a striking inner density. Contrapuntal lines come and go, and draw blood by colliding with one another. Quiet moments abound: a long melody of agonizing beauty in Gideon Klein‘s Sonata, floating high above a disturbed harmonic pinning. No composer of any consequence — none, at least, that I can name — carried this style forward. A few months after these three Terezin inmates met their deaths, the war ended, and composers apparently sensed the need for a new beginning. Soon there would be electronic music, musique concrete, total serialism, the computer. By the time the Terezin music came to light, it was already old-fashioned. The timing for a re-evaluation may be just right; Formenti’s performances showed the way. I told him of my surprise that so important a musician, putting forward so striking a repertory, goes unrecorded. “I‘m just as surprised,” was his answer.

Sunday morning’s concert, traditionally at Ojai a time for lighter fare, was taken over by the blatant pretense of Ute Lemper‘s cabaret-songs act (complete with barstool and wineglass to underscore the point) and Eliot Fisk’s guitar of similar motivation. The Emerson Quartet, performing in three concerts the final five quartets of Beethoven and the final three of Shostakovich, had this year‘s top billing, and they were indeed as splendid at their work as everybody knew they would be. Formenti’s three appearances were even more spectacular, if only because he was far less known to the crowd. In addition to the “marathon,” he gave a “family concert” of “Today‘s Music for Today’s Kids”: four brand-new works full of electronic trickery and, in the case of Georg Haas‘ wonderully resonant Hommage a Ligeti, of two pianos side by side, one of them tuned a quarter-tone lower than the other, on which Formenti performed simultaneously (!). (He had done the same with another spellbinding work in his debut concerts at LACMA two years ago.) He then repeated that program, with additions, at a grown-ups concert that afternoon. At the morning event he had invited the kids in the audience to come onstage and look at the gadgetry close up; the look of the slender, diminutive Formenti playing paterfamilias to a surging juvenile horde remains fixed as one of the festival’s visual astonishments.

Formenti is a consummate artist, whose scope expands at every new viewing. He hadn‘t delved into the established repertory before this visit. Now we have his Beethoven and Schubert to add to our estimation: the former’s fiery, cheekily capricious Opus 126 Bagatelles and the deep purple of Schubert‘s last sonata, composed mere weeks before his death. The latter work became, with Formenti, virtually a tone poem about fate and death: the left-hand trills like dark portents, a pronounced but controlled rubato in the first movement, as a weakened body fending off blows. The incredible moment in the slow movement where the mournful music in C-sharp minor sideslips to our amazement into a C-major far side of the moon seemed to stop everyone’s breath, the cherishable Formenti no less than the rest of us.

To close the weekend, the Emersons drew from the shadows the dark chills of Shostakovich‘s final quartet, the work the group had played last spring at UCLA at the core of the remarkable Noise of Time theatrical event. Even alone onstage, the work is pure theater: deep, pained melodic utterances that well up from a profound impulse beyond reckoning; a sculpture formed at the edge of silence. At the end these four marvelous musicians held the audience in a long time of responsorial silence, and the birds of Ojai framed the moment with their own golden thread. Then we all piled into our cars and made it back to reality.