So I've Heard

COMPOSER, PERFORMER, MEDIA HOST, writer and musicological avatar to the immortal P.D.Q. Bach: The marvel of Peter Schickele is not only the variety of his parts but also how well they all fit, the one to another. Composer/performers are a dime a dozen these days, judging from the press handouts and homemade CDs in my daily mail. What propels Schickele out to the front of the crowd is the awareness of music’s past, present and plausible future on which his multifarious activities rest.
Last week’s concert at Zipper Hall, with Schickele participating — alongside the local-based Armadillo String Quartet and a clutch of soloists in a program of his music, including a couple of world premieres — was full of delight. More important, it was full of wisdom.

It takes an exceptionally wise composer to offer, on a single evening, his own music drawn from influences as diverse as the Renaissance master Orlando di Lasso and the playing of country fiddlers near Schickele’s own home in upstate New York. A piece called Delta Jukebox merged the sounds of two bassoons and piano into a delicious Dixieland takeoff; a string quartet subtitled “A Year in the Country” became an engaging blend of love of nature (a deserving shelf-mate to Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony) and solid Juilliard academe. Best of all was the Serenade for Six, created for the scoring of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet plus bassoon, music that seeks to re-express the pure, blithe beauty of that bygone work and comes admirably close.

Schickele’s music goes down easily, and stays put. Its outside sources are easy to spot; its easygoing charms are not beyond a touch of slickness. His spoken program notes are given to garrulity, and there are moments when the ghost of P.D.Q. peeks out between the “serious” lines. Next season Schickele has a residency with the Pasadena Symphony, whose conductor Jorge Mester has been a longtime participant in the comic programs; the many sides of his creative persona will be on view — glorious, hilarious and most welcome.

The Philharmonic’s Chamber Music Society programs had ended the week before, up at the Skirball Center’s misdesigned and uncomfortable Ahmanson Hall. Bartók’s Second Quartet was the evening’s major work, in a taut, gripping performance by violinists Elizabeth Baker and Stacy Wetzel, violist John Hayhurst, and cellist David Garrett. I missed the sublime unity and manic drive the Penderecki Quartet had given the work at LACMA last month, but that would be asking too much from players assembled for this one occasion. The program was otherwise merely pleasant: Dohnanyi’s Serenade for string trio and, at the end, Dvorák’s G-major Quintet but without the “Notturno” movement that is the work’s highlight. The setting was merely unpleasant; I will attend future concerts at this venue only with the greatest reluctance. Just the problem of getting to one’s seat requires the skill of a tightrope walker. I overheard comparable ill will expressed by a number of longtime subscribers around me.

WHAT IS THE WORST PIECE OF MUSIC in general circulation? I keep changing my mind, but after last week’s visit to Costa Mesa’s Performing Arts Center I think I’ll stick with Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony for the time being. Carl St. Clair led his Pacific Symphony on a level of eloquence that the music itself never once attained; this, in case you haven’t heard, is an extremely good orchestra these days, under extremely good leadership. Seldom, however, has so much nobility of purpose been squandered on such ignoble merchandise.

On a not-unrelated matter, the Los Angeles Opera finally has its Turandot, if anyone cares, its arrival last weekend enhanced by word of Luciano Berio’s much-touted new musical setting for the final scene (the icy Princess, raped by the unnamed Prince, learns to like it) for which the text exists but not Puccini’s music. Berio knows the Puccini manner; he has turned up the harmony one or two notches and created an orchestral summation
in which some bits previously heard are worked into a complex new texture — comparable to the final exegesis in Wozzeck — and during which, on Saturday night at least, the two almost-in-love antagonists faced off, paid their obeisances to the body of the dead Liù, brandished daggers at one another and contrived to look busy as best they could. That might work with proper singing actors; Saturday’s audience, however, was obliged to countenance two
oversize (but thunderously endowed in the voice department) opera singers doing the old clutch ‘n’ lurch at each other. That, alas, was just plain silly, to the point that Berio’s contribution — clearly superior to Franco Alfano’s finale in common use up to now — was seriously compromised.

Kent Nagano’s conducting was of his usual high standard; it is clearly a new era at the L.A. Opera when a conductor earns cheers before conducting a single note. The production — by Gian-Carlo del Monaco on Michael Scott’s massive, dark sets — doesn’t offend the eye until the last scene, in a drab and dreary throne room with choir stalls left empty while the chorus sings offstage. That chorus had been far more watchable crawling on its collective belly during the great moonrise music in Act 1. Audrey Stottler was the unwieldy Turandot; Franco Farina, a Calaf of comparable grace. Hei-Kyung Hong, the Liù, stole the show — an easy steal under the circumstances.

The cheers that greeted Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Foreign Bodies in its Philharmonic premiere almost reached me in southern Indiana. There, in a town about the size of this page, I was taking in a sanity-restoring festival of old-timey hillbilly music marvelously played, and Purcell (the improbably silly but endearing King Arthur) at BLEMF, the Bloomington Early-Music Festival. After a couple of days with Salonen’s score, abetted by a recording a friend had snuck at the performance, I can understand the cheers, and await the work’s inevitable next time around. Immediately amazing is the detail, the intricate and exact placement of instruments as minutely specified on the printed page; this is the work of a composer with an astounding ear for sonority, rivaled in our time perhaps only by Pierre Boulez. On this incomplete evidence, I would still value Salonen’s LA Variations above this new piece, most of all for the way the former’s propulsion stems from the unfolding of the material itself rather than the motoric energy that in the new work seems to be applied from outside. That, however, is an incomplete evaluation that time and further acquaintance will surely amend.

. . . the faithful flee: So goes the rhyme in support of equal temperament. Music, your old prof surely had you believe, draws its strength from its harmonic progressions, and they derive their strength from the set of falsities and compromises worked out in Bach’s time to enable composers to create cadences and chromaticisms in all 24 keys. There are, however, holdouts. Harry Partch used to proclaim that music started going wrong about A.D. 1000, and built his own instruments to rescue the art from the tamperers. Lou Harrison‘s music draws much of its strength from his flirtations with Asian scales. Anybody with access to a couple of transistors can prove that the 12 tones of the familiar chromatic scale are the mere base of the mountain, whose electronically attained peak is, as they say, outta sight.

You can’t drop in on new-music events nowadays without encountering some kind of challenge to the old, set-in-stone principles. Microfest 2002, the latest installment of an annual celebration of notes-between-notes, began on May 10 and continues in various venues through May 26, with Harrison himself, a birthday boy at 85, attending the May 25th event at Pierce College. At the County Museum the resident California EAR Unit dubbed its seasonal finale “Brownout” and trooped blithely across the audible spectrum. Five days later, on the same stage, the phenomenal Stefano Scodanibbio played spellbinding music on his string bass, the one instrument in the “traditional” family that rebels most clamorously against the captivity of “correct” tuning. As surcease the Philharmonic performed a whole program in D major –Brahms and Mahler — as if to proclaim that life persists in the realm of major, minor and the dominant-seventh chord. But there, too — in the slow movement of the Mahler First — the music draws delight from its tightrope acts, its purposeful “sour” notes on the edge of tonality.

Music of inequal temperament — and here I also include the whole range of the pre-Bach repertory in “historically informed” performance — does, of course, breed problems, for the ears of hearers and, I should think, players as well. Our Western ears (“Western” as in “civilization”) are conditioned from an early age to recognize the pull of a dominant chord resolving to a tonic; it‘s when that resolution is kicked out of context (as in Mozart’s glorious deceptive cadences) that great music thrives on its power to hold the attention, even to shock. The problems are surmountable, of course. I cherish my five-CD set (now, alas, out of print) of La Monte Young‘s Well-Tuned Piano, because rhythm and — yes — melody hold the attention by sheer energy during five hours of suspended, indeterminate harmony. Scodanibbio’s concert began with his Oltracuidansa, an hourlong piece for bass and prerecorded tape, which reached me because the spiky, dark forms wrapped around one another generated an infectious aggressiveness that accorded nicely with my usual expectations in hearing a new piece.

The EAR Unit concert was, again, full of noble if sometimes strenuous invention. The best piece — on first hearing, that is — was Nick Chase‘s OPUS, which sought to integrate the newly coined gadgetry of turntable manipulation into the familiar textures of the EAR’s madcap percussionists. The turntable stuff, which Chase himself played, wasn‘t just the needle-scratch torture I’ve heard (and unhappily endured) in a lot of hip-hop; these were recordings of recognizable music (didn‘t I hear one of the Liszt Etudes?) speeded up and slowed down by hand and fed into the surrounding brouhaha like a running series of musical puns. Laetitia Sonami’s A Blind Ride and Anna Rubin‘s Landmine were sound-process works, with samplings electronically manipulated; Sonami’s work achieved its effects via a glove embedded with sensors, which made the work as much fun to watch as to hear. Every little bit helps.

Out at Claremont College the first Microfest concert wandered widely over the map of contemporary possibility. This year‘s Microfest — five events in all — is all about “Global Tunings”; the first event drew upon the excellent studentfaculty gamelan maintained by Claremont’s Harvey Mudd College and led by Bill Alves, composer and faculty member of that school. The program drew a large if not full house; the sounds were handsome. (I would extend that accolade even to Tom Flaherty‘s antic Bowling Bells, which used a surrogate “gamelan” of kitchen bowls of various sizes and states of emptiness, played with a variety of implements including combs, toothbrushes and you-name-it.)

Some of the music, including three brief, shapely works by Alves himself, drew upon traditional Indonesian gamelan techniques, extended exercises in resonant stasis. One work, however, Masashi Ito’s Water Drops, imposed a more Western design onto the sonorities of the gamelan: melodic lines over a throbbing accompaniment and, near the end, an infusion of solid, academic counterpoint. It proved a valid venture in bridge building. Kipling‘s dictum to the contrary, East needn’t always be East.

Meanwhile, back in D major . . . I emerged from the aforementioned Philharmonic concert twice drunk: first from Hilary Hahn‘s extraordinary performance of Brahms’ Violin Concerto, then from Esa-Pekka Salonen‘s wild ride through Mahler’s First Symphony. Of these two inebriating experiences, Salonen‘s success with the Mahler might have been easier to predict. Even so, his detailing of the work’s loopy mood-swings, the sardonic cackle in the gallows-humorous third movement, the apocalyptic visions at the end (with eight — count ‘em — eight hornists standing erect, the better to challenge the celestial powers) was the stuff of wonderment.

A few weeks ago someone on our Letters page accused me of the critic’s cardinal sin, predictability; I wish he‘d been with me that night. (No, I don’t, really.) I have used my space here more than once to proclaim my allergies to a) nubile violinists still in, or recently out of, their teens and b) that particular work and most of its companions in the Brahms catalog. The 22-year-old Hilary Hahn redeemed both those hang-ups that night with a performance elegant, eloquent and suffused with a degree of lyrical intensity that, for at least the 39 minutes of its duration, made it the masterwork that had pretty much eluded my recognition over the past, let‘s say, 65 years. The sheer insistence of her tone production might even have elevated a lesser work that night; what it accomplished for Brahms is somewhat beyond belief. That incredible buildup of melodic persuasion that ends the concerto’s first movement echoes in my skull as I write these words 10 days later. Who could have predicted?

One special image comes to mind when Toru Takemitsu’s music is at hand. It is the final moment in Akira Kurosawa‘s Ran, for which Takemitsu composed the score that is one of film music’s supreme achievements. The film is Kurosawa‘s gloss on Shakespeare’s Lear, and its final shot is of a lone figure, blind and abandoned (Edgar? The Fool? Gloucester?) playing his flute at the edge of a precipice over which he will surely fall. A solitary figure, a solitary line of music: I cannot think of another brief moment in film where sight and sound are so inextricably meshed. It haunted me in absentia throughout the Philharmonic‘s marvelous Takemitsu concert at Royce Hall last week.

“The song I would like to sing,” Takemitsu remarked in the 1990s, “is not a simple lyric line but more than this — a narrative line intertwined with many threads . . .” Many threads were twined around Takemitsu’s own musical life as well. Largely self-taught in his native Japan, he studied — “devoured,” more to the point — Debussy‘s half-tints, Messiaen’s pantheistic ecstasies, Cage‘s artistic libertarianism. He also devoured the visual world, most of all through cinema; he claimed to have seen something like 300 films a year. More than any previous composer who made a public fuss about music combining the senses — Scriabin, Richard Strauss — Takemitsu wrote music that demands being thought of as pansensual. Only Messiaen, whose music Takemitsu adored, attempted anything comparable; on Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Royce Hall program there was the wise inclusion of Messiaen‘s brief Un Sourire, a journey through smiling quasi-Mozart interrupted by delighted outbursts from vast flocks of garrulous birds.

It was an evening of loving homage. The British pianist Paul Crossley was on hand to perform a couple of Takemitsu’s brightly colored short solo pieces and, with the orchestra, the Philharmonic-commissioned (in 1984) riverrun. What a wonderful score! Beyond its title — the first word of Finnegans Wake — this is music of darts and flows, of surges and bends. In his excellent program note, Paul Chihara writes of its “overall texture of ravishing transparency, not unlike the subtle brush strokes of Asian calligraphy,” and that is part of the truth here. The rest of the truth is the sense of sheer exuberance that comes through in the best of Takemitsu‘s music, the revel in the splashes and bursts that constantly proclaim the oneness of the senses.

I’ve read a fair amount of nonsense about Takemitsu‘s music, most of it reaction to the timeworn cliches about Japaneseness rather than to his artistic visions. “His music is tranquil to the point of somnolence,” writes the grossly and chronically misguided Norman Lebrecht in his Companion to 20th Century Music. “There is a sameness about each new piece,” etc. etc. There are recordings to underline the fallacy of such judgments, and a fine Takemitsu video in Sony’s “Music for Movies” series. Salonen‘s program ended with Three Film Scores, a suite Takemitsu arranged for string orchestra from his music for three early films noirs: astonishing essays in projecting maximum sinew and menace through purposely reduced means — and, thus, another remarkable joining of black-and-white sight and sound.

Figaro tells Rosina that she must write a note to her mysterious wooer confirming her interest in his importuning. Rosina reaches into her whatever and produces the note, already written. They then join voices in a lively duet in praise of womanly wiles. That moment adds little to the onward progress of Rossini’s Barber of Seville, but sung as it was at the Irvine Barclay Theater the other night it becomes an irresistible affirmation of the power of music to make singers and audience rejoice in each other‘s presence.

Opera Pacific’s Barber happened not in the company‘s usual unwelcoming venue at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Hall but in the smaller, friendlier Irvine Barclay. The orchestra was reduced; the first notes out of the Barclay‘s pit, and everything after that, had a richness and a warmth of sound that you just don’t hear at Segerstrom. Canada‘s Robert Tweten, in his company debut, led a performance fleet and affectionate, with the ensembles — including the hurly-burly that ends the first act — nicely balanced. Linda Brovsky’s direction was a comedic delight, not merely from a bunch of funny individuals but from a beautiful integration of stage trickery that offered up the illusion of an ensemble that had worked together for years.

John Packard was an agile con man of a Figaro, fresh from his title role in Dead Man Walking and finally granted real music to sing; John Osborn, if you overlook a bit of squall on his top notes, was the dashing Almaviva. (His big final aria, “Cessa di Piu Resistere,” was dropped, as it usually is: probably the better part of valor.) Lynette Tapia, his real-life wife, was the enchanting Rosina, working the role in the canary, or Lili Pons, register rather than the more authentic clarinet, or Marilyn Horne, version, and tossing off a small but right-on top “D” in the “Lesson Scene.” Andrew Fernando, the Bartolo, and Christopher Scott Feigum, the Basilio in a company debut, made a comic pair to the manner born.

An Opera Pacific representative tells me there are no plans at the moment for future productions at the Barclay. Granted that Segerstrom has many more seats — close to a 4-to-1 ratio — there was something uniquely endearing about this opera in this place, as there was with Mark Adamo‘s Little Women last year — and as there always is with the Long Beach Opera, in a hall of comparable size.

That sad thing known as Morimur, if lucky you have already forgotten, came about to illustrate a German musicologist’s whacked-out theory that Bach‘s sublime D-minor Partita for solo violin was a kind of memorial offering to his departed first wife, and that the theory can be supported by imposing a number of conveniently morose chorale tunes between movements of the Partita and atop a performance of the final great Chaconne. In order to make this work, some of the chorales had to be transposed to fit the D-minorness of the Partita. That in itself violates an important baroque principle, wherein particular keys take on particular personalities. Don’t get me going on this or I‘ll put you all to sleep.

Anyhow, the Morimur gig at Schoenberg Hall last month was above all deadly dull, with violinist Christopher Poppen playing like a stick and the Hilliard Ensemble (with one personnel change since the recording) sounding as tired as the enterprise itself. After their position high up on the classical and crossover charts last fall, the people who perpetrated that mess of a pseudo-baroque excursion, recorded on ECM, drew only a half-full house at UCLA’s small Schoenberg Hall. There is hope for us yet.#

Within a week in late April the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra played in two local venues, at Glendale‘s Alex Theater and UCLA’s Royce Hall, and three on the East Coast, Portland, Hartford and at Manhattan‘s Carnegie Hall. I heard the first and the last. Thomas Quasthoff was soloist in all five concerts: Bach’s “Kreuzstab” Cantata (known in enlightened circles as “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear”) and Ravel‘s Don Quichotte a Dulcinee in the local events, two Bach cantatas in the others. At all concerts this phenomenal — and phenomenally charming — singer obliged the tumultuous audience response with the same encore, Jerome Kern’s “Ol‘ Man River.”

Noble and moving as was the Bach, deliciously insinuating as was the Ravel cycle, that encore was even more amazing. It came across not merely as a fine realization of Kern’s rolling, stirring lyrical line; it was like a reinvention of the song, and an installation of it as a cornerstone of an entire American theatrical language. Never mind that the words this time bore the ever-so-slight tinge of a Germanic enunciation; never mind the unlikelihood of this particular singer ever having to “tote that barge, lift that bale.” To hear this music shaped with such conviction by a singer whose Bach, Mozart and Schubert — not to mention his indispensable new Deutsche Grammophon disc of German comic-opera arias — rank among music‘s treasures is to suggest a rethinking of the place and history of America’s musical theater. As it happens, I‘d heard rather a lot of American attempts at opera composition these past few weeks, which I’ll get back to in a minute. Quasthoff‘s singing of “Ol’ Man River” set them all adrift.

Haydn‘s Symphony No. 102 began the Chamber Orchestra’s programs, superior music even among that composer‘s sublime final works, astounding in the solemn beauty of its sinuous slow-movement theme, captivating for the jokey scoring of the finale. It made for a superb visiting-orchestra piece, for the fine balance in Jeffrey Kahane’s pacing and for the elegance of Allan Vogel‘s oboe solos and Kenneth Munday’s recounting of the Great Bassoon Joke in the finale. At the end came Ginastera‘s Variaciones Concertantes, another showoff piece but of lesser substance (and a decided downer after the Quasthoff solos). At the Alex the performance had at least been sprightly; at Carnegie, even in the air space of that acoustical marvel, it sounded decidedly tired — proving that if you’re going to play the same music five times in a week it had better be good.

American opera took a wrong turn not long after “Ol‘ Man River.” Porgy and Bess was polluted at the start by its dreams of grandeur, its reaching out toward Wagnerian — or, at least, Puccinian — models; the later, slimmed-down version with spoken dialogue instead of recitative is far more moving. After WWII there was American opera by the carload, much of it financed by ill-considered foundation grants, almost all of it in a further attempt to recapture Puccini as one of our own. Robert Ward’s The Crucible, commissioned in 1961 by the New York City Opera, was that kind of beast: Arthur Miller‘s powerful drama (Joseph McCarthy’s inquisitors thinly disguised as Salem‘s witch-hunters) diluted and overperfumed by its sweet, modern-but-not-so-bad music. Speaking at USC before last month’s production by the USC Thornton Opera Workshop at the Flora L. Thornton School of Music in cooperation with the USC Thornton Chamber Orchestra — doesn‘t this get a tad ridiculous, or at least thorny? — the beaming, white-maned Ward was every bit the Central Casting paragon of the distinguished elder creator of the artistically bland. An adept young cast, under Timothy Lindberg’s musical direction, had been gulled into learning the music‘s banalities. If this constitutes a learning experience, it’s only the study of how easily great dramatic material can be turned into mush when the price is right.

At the Metropolitan there was more mush: John Harbison‘s short-of-the-mark stab at turning The Great Gatsby into opera, brought back for a second run after two years. On the operatic stage there is no more of the shape of Gatsby than in the various attempts to capture its essence on film. The power of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is its very novelistic perfection; its characters are so fully formed on the page, and live so completely within us when we set the book down, that any further attempt to give them flesh becomes an exercise in redundancy. Jay Gatsby is only reduced in the person of Alan Ladd or Robert Redford — and the more fatally disintegrated in the drabness (sight and sound, both) of the Met‘s Jerry Hadley. So — and this I report with some incredulity — is the otherwise adored person of Dawn Upshaw, her earthbound girlishness at odds with the disembodied, green-lit Daisy of Fitzgerald’s fantasy. James Levine, who conducted, is said to hold Gatsby in high regard. His work, Upshaw‘s loveliness even when miscast as here — and two brief scenes in which Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, as the tragic Myrtle Wilson, did indeed set the stage ablaze — were reasons enough for frittering away a New York evening at Gatsby. When those participants move on, as they someday must, I hold little hope for the opera.

Better than either of these — but clobbered by the predatory New York press — was Stephen Paulus’ taut, elegant retelling of Heloise and Abelard, for which Frank Corsaro provided the libretto and directed the Juilliard Opera Theater production (with, of all people, our own Miguel Harth-Bedoya on the podium). This is Paulus‘ eighth opera; The Postman Always Rings Twice is his best-known. The new work is real opera: memorable, even heart-rending ensembles, characters nicely drawn, scenes shaped with a dramatist’s hand and not a moment too long, vocal lines the work of a composer who knows the voice and what it can do. Perhaps I liked it so well on Saturday night because of the monstrosity that afternoon, but I came home from New York with this work out front in my memory.

The “monstrosity” was Sly, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari‘s unendurable pastiche of thirdhand Puccini and a whiff of Stravinsky badly comprehended. The Domingos have taken it on. Placido gets a couple of loud, squally arias; Marta gets to try more of her misblocked, clumsy stage direction. The production, which Placido is said to own outright, mirrors the drabness of the score and adds a few visual insults along the way. No announcement has yet surfaced as to the future of this abomination — which originated at Domingo’s own Washington Opera — but I don‘t think it’s too soon to man the battlements.

Photo by Christine Alicino

WHERE MUSIC CAME FROM, WHERE music stands today, where music is going: lovely questions, these, that nobly sustain motor-mouth moderators of pre-concert “symposiums” and writers of program notes. They were more easily answerable in my younger days. I grew up in an age of definition (or so it seemed): sonata form, rondo form, modulation to the dominant, pop, classical. When my best friend, pianist Normy, showed me he could play boogie-woogie as well as Grieg’s Piano Concerto, I felt him the traitor and myself betrayed.

Last night — driving out to Glendale to hear the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, with Thomas Quasthoff singing Bach and Jeffrey Kahane conducting Haydn, in a concert I will try to remember always — I had John Adams’ Naïve and Sentimental Music on the car stereo: a surging, complex interweaving of past and present. This morning I listened over coffee to “Morning Bell,” a cut from Amnesiac, Radiohead’s latest album, no less complex, its interweaving accomplished electronically rather than by spreading its wealth through the players in a large symphony orchestra, yet beholden to the past in the way its major/minor fluidity seems to echo, say, Mahler. In younger days I would have assumed the need for a cultural wall between the one kind of music and the other. Now I am no longer sure. I am not as qualified to write about Radiohead — or Moby (whose Play is also in my car stereo player) or Diana Krall, whom I have come to adore — as I am about John Adams. But I am delighted to discover that, at least, the wall is down.

Naïve and Sentimental Music was introduced by Salonen and the Philharmonic three years ago and recorded for Nonesuch at the time; that recording has finally been released. At 48 minutes’ duration, it remains Adams’ most extended non-vocal work. After its premiere my words included such adjectives as dazzling, brutal and wrenching. “All three movements,” I wrote in 1999 and have no reason to retract, “work their way toward intense climaxes through powerful gatherings of resources. The slow movement is deeply dark and inward, and the outer movements rattle your bones with the splendor of huge performing forces wondrously deployed.” The accumulative power at the beginning, the solo flute out in orchestral darkness and the progression from that solo to the massive outburst several minutes later, grabs you and won’t let go; it is not — as I discovered the other night — conducive to careful driving on the Glendale Freeway.

A YEAR LATER ADAMS PRODUCED EL Niño; that work, too, has been released — the audio version on Nonesuch, the video on the ArtHaus label distributed by Naxos. (Both Naïve and Sentimental and El Niño are scheduled for the Philharmonic’s 2002-03 season.) Both recordings date from the work’s December 2000 premiere at the Chtelet in Paris under Kent Nagano’s splendid direction. I saw the San Francisco performance a couple of months later.

There are problems here, not so much of Adams’ doing, but of a certain ponderousness in the weight of the whole project. The work’s premise is to recount the Nativity story as a folktale with contemporary resonances — most of all its relation to barrio life among impoverished Latinos; poetry by modern Spanish-language writers is interspersed with texts from ancient sources, including narratives from the Apocrypha and other legends about the infant (“El Niño”) Jesus and the Holy Family in flight. Peter Sellars’ staging, and his accompanying film, picks up on this, with East L.A. standing in for old Bethlehem and the surrounding desert filled with the rocks and flora of Joshua Tree. On the stage the result was a severe sensory overload; on video the two-dimensional screen reduces the problem somewhat but not completely. The haunting, poignant singing of Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson and Willard White — whose faces in close-up do carry the drama forward — are painfully undercut by segues to scenes in latter-day tenement kitchens and rooftops.

I am, therefore, torn. It’s nice to have the expressive art of those singers, and of the handsome young members of Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices impersonating annunciating angels and the like, as close as my TV set, but El Niño on video is basically unwatchable. The deep, rich lyricism of Adams’ music, however, its eclecticism spread wide but beautifully balanced, makes either version — with both the CD and the DVD almost identically priced, by the way — a privilege to own.

The resemblance is coincidental and fascinating: Adams’ accounting of Christianity’s central epic in terms of Latino-tinged words and music; Osvaldo Golijov doing the same — in a somewhat more extroverted stage piece — in his Passion According to Saint Mark, about which I have also previously waxed ecstatic. (That extraordinary work comes to Costa Mesa’s Eclectic Orange Festival October 18 and 19; you don’t dare not to be there.) By way of teaser, three of its arias ended the last Green Umbrella concert at the Zipper, with the radiant Brazilian mezzo-soprano Luciana Souza on hand to repeat her performance from the work’s premiere, joined by soprano Jessica Rivera and the Philharmonic’s New Music Group under Yasuo Shinozaki.

Moment by moment, thanks to the recording (on Hänssler) and word of mouth, this music becomes familiar without losing its unique impact. There was other Golijov on the Umbrella program as well, including a Lullaby and Doina for a small ensemble that spun forth 10 minutes of simple beauty, profound and altogether memorable. There was also Marijn Simons, Dutch-born violinist and composer, age 19, who started things off with a half-hour violin concerto called Secret Notes. Who had ever heard of him before? Not you, not I, only the sharp-eared and -eyed Christopher Hailey, who spotted him in Europe and brought him to the Philharmonic’s attention.

Wow. Young Marijn puts on a terrific show, with music to match. Someone has groomed him well in the arts of stage flirtation — with audience and with orchestra. His concerto, three movements with funny names, is all a 19-year-old’s showoff piece, but the dazzle is infectious and may even be genuine. You could think back to the cocky young Lenny and write off this newcomer, but you also have to think of the other recent almost-adolescent Thomas Adès, with his Asyla composed at about the same age; that, too, is all prickle and hot sparks, and an undeniable sense of arrogant mastery under it all. The definitions, as I was saying, no longer apply.

THE PERPETRATORS OF DEAD MAN WALKING — the opera inflicted upon the stage of Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Hall these past few nights — have gone to some lengths to distance themselves from Tim Robbins’ 1995 film of the same name and derivation. Their source, or so they would have us believe, has been Sister Helen Prejean’s original book, her harrowing death-row memoir — even though its central character has undergone a change of name from “Matt” to the more singable “Joe.” It was Sister Helen, not Tim Robbins or any of his commendable collaborators on that film, who joined the Opera Pacific cast in the curtain calls at Segerstrom. You can assume, therefore, that this strong and compassionate woman has acquiesced in the turning of her brave words into the unfocused, stumbling product that has earned the unfathomable cheers of misguided multitudes — two seasons ago at the San Francisco Opera, now here, onward and upward to a date with destiny at the New York City Opera next September.

Go back and see the film, its outpouring of moral outrage — against capital punishment and against those who wrongly set their minds against the powers of salvation — so memorably caught in the haunted, troubled eyes of Susan Sarandon’s Sister Helen and the insidious cynicism of Sean Penn’s Matt Poncelet. They are further echoed in the composite track of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s songs twined around the slash of Eddie Vedder’s and Ry Cooder’s music and even the dull ache of Bruce Springsteen’s version of the title song under the final credits. Set this consummate workmanship against the opera: stick figures of Terrence McNally’s sudsy libretto set to Jake Heggie’s appallingly second-rate assemblage of musical gestures. Dead Man Walking in its reality has turned out as abject a disaster as it first appeared on paper.

Opera Pacific’s production was actually the work’s second; those unlucky souls who have seen both tell me the San Francisco version, larger and trickier, was even more of a mess. The new one, with Michael McGarty’s skeletal sets — its up-and-down panels suggesting a chorus of unmanned guillotines — is slimmed down for travel. John DeMain conducted, as he also will in New York; although I am disinclined to delve deeply into differences between his version and that of San Francisco’s Patrick Summers — now available on Erato discs, if you care — I am sure it was strong and good. Kristine Jepson sang the Sister Helen, richly and caringly, although Susan Graham’s singing nun on disc has superior frazzle. Frederica von Stade, for whom Jake Heggie has become house composer, was once again the killer’s mother, as in San Francisco, a killer role that deserved killer music but got none.

THE PHILHARMONIC HAS GIVEN US MOZART these past two weeks, but with intrusions. Andreas Delfs, currently of the Milwaukee Symphony, led the first program, delivering a Mozart stiff and hasty, ending with the 40th Symphony, the prescribed repeats unaccountably (and inexcusably) omitted. Andrea Rost — the lovable Pamina in the L.A. Opera’s recent Magic Flute — sang two concert arias most appealingly. The intruder, a presence on the program beyond sense or value, was the 17 minutes of Chambers (as in Street), a sort of symphonic memoir of Lower Manhattan pre-9/11, co-commissioned by the Philharmonic and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and given here in its world premiere. Its composer, Theodore Shapiro (sha-PIE-ro, he insists), works in films, with State and Main his most recent score. Since that music made no impression on me the first time, I went back to check; it made no impression the second time, either. Neither did Chambers, bland and burbling. Secondhand Bernstein can only mean, after all, third- or fourth-hand everybody else.

Fond memories of Christian Zacharias’ Philharmonic visit in 2000 — as both-at-once conductor and pianist — brought an uncommonly large crowd to his return to lead the second Mozart week. The intruders this time were more welcome: fist-shaking Sturm-und-Drang symphonies by Joseph Martin Kraus and Haydn, bookending two Mozart concertos, rapturously beautiful and rapturously played. Kraus’ dates (1756­1792) are almost the same as Mozart’s. His C-minor Symphony, which Haydn is said to have admired, is a slice of run-of-the-mill classical writing: dark-toned, minor harmonies that never quite coalesce into real tunes; brave exercises in counterpoint that never quite turn into genuine fugues; unadventurous scoring (including, in this case, four horns instead of the usual two to provide a thick, thudding bass) that points up the inadequacy of whatever orchestral forces the composer could draw upon.

It’s good to hear this music, if only to realize the ways in which Mozart and Haydn rose above the mere craftsmen — the Jake Heggies and Theodore Shapiros — of their time. Ten measures into the grand, forthright opening of Mozart’s D-major Piano Concerto (K. 451), or 10 measures out of the first movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 80 — with his giggling little subsidiary tune popping up in different keys all over the place, punctuated by trick silences — and you know where the likes of Joseph Martin Kraus fit into the picture. At the keyboard or out in front, Zacharias charmed utterly. Best of all was his re-creation of the essence of Mozart’s piano concertos, the warm-hearted, loving, intensely intelligent conversations between piano and orchestra.

I KEEP NOT HAVING THE SPACE TO REMEMBER one more concert of recent weeks, the County Museum’s program by the Toronto-based Penderecki String Quartet — another of those fearless ensembles that thrive unfazed on daunting new music and perform it with joy and intelligence commingled. Their program this time consisted of second quartets — Szymanowski, Bartók, Ligeti. As an encore, rather than the expected tidbit from
somewhere or other, they threw in another
whole work, the Second of their namesake Penderecki — phenomenal, complex music infused with great spirit. At the end, after nearly two hours of music that carried both technique and expression to far horizons, they
invited the audience — pleasantly large, as these events go — to come onstage, look at their music and ask questions.

It was a lovely event, the chance to hang out for nearly an extra hour with splendid,
dedicated young musicians and hear them out on, for example, what it takes to coordinate an ensemble where one performer has, say, 16 notes to play in time with another’s 15. Nobody seemed anxious to leave, and when we did it was with the sense of having been brought unexpectedly, delightfully close to some challenging creativity. More of this sort of thing should happen — not the jabberwocky of the “symposium” on the meaning of genius that preceded the Zacharias concert at the Music Center last Thursday night, but something that puts into simple, meaningful language what it is that keeps us involved in the musical world as that world crumbles around us bit by bit, and why we bother.

“Schubert’s dynamics,” asserts the Isabelle Huppert character in Michael Haneke‘s gut-wrenching new film The Piano Teacher, “range from scream to whisper, not loud to soft.” Her student-victim is struggling with the slow movement of the A-major Sonata, one of the three extraordinary works in the genre that Schubert created during his last year. In a month that has also seen the reissue of Milos Forman’s Amadeus with 20 more minutes of psychobabbling gobbledygook tacked onto that mendacious epic, Haneke‘s film stands out, among other reasons, for its success in telling the truth about serious music. And when it comes to detailing the workings of that particular slow movement, the script is dead-on accurate.

By coincidence — or perhaps not — Murray Perahia’s piano recital at Royce Hall two weeks ago had the same sonata as its centerpiece, and his journey through the slow movement accomplished in notes and tone color and dynamics exactly what the words expressed in the film. That slow movement, which follows the forthright, larger-than-life statements that begin the sonata, oozes into our awareness with an elegiac, disturbed theme of few but poignant notes that do, indeed, whisper of tragedy beyond words. But then the tragedy deepens and Schubert screams aloud. Himself on the brink of death, he escorts us, too, toward that brink; if ever a solo piano has painted a vision of infernal regions, it is here. But then Schubert pulls us back and, in a couple of bars of just single notes spaced out, almost but not quite restores the quietude of the movement‘s opening. As the elegiac melody resumes, the turmoil of that interruption remains as a distant rumble; it chastens our memories as we return to reality. (A similar sequence of events, by the way, takes place in Schubert’s C-major String Quintet, another miraculous work from that same final year.)

Perahia is a superb romantic pianist; on records and in concert he still grows in depth and generosity of spirit. His latest Sony disc, completing his set of the Bach keyboard concertos, offers everything you need to know about the meaning of eloquence. His concert at Royce — Beethoven‘s laconic, ill-tempered C-minor Variations at the start, Chopin full of stardust, including a lavish assortment of encores, at the end — drew a large and happy crowd, despite the fact that Alfred Brendel was performing, a few miles away at the Music Center, the same night.

By good fortune — for the local pianomanes, at least — Brendel repeated his program two nights later, and in a better venue, the intimate Barclay Theater at UC Irvine. He, too, played variations, the astonishing “Diabelli” set that Beethoven fashioned simultaneously with the Ninth Symphony. Perhaps “played” is too slight a word; what Brendel accomplished that night was a closer penetration than I can remember ever hearing into Beethoven’s clear intent in this hourlong extravaganza, his sardonic glee in his own power to transform Diabelli‘s insipid little waltz-tune into the scaffolding for a huge, profound musical structure.

There’s nothing else in music quite like the Diabellis, with their blend of haunting, stirring musical inventions into a compelling demonstration of the pure joy of composition. The very fact of its stop-and-go form — 33 separate dissertations on the power within that dopey little theme, culminating in a dazzling double fugue that then subsides into a deliciously anticlimactic, smiling epilogue — makes its expressive impact the more remarkable.

All of this became revelatory last week in the totally immersed figure of Brendel, hunched over his piano as if trying to swallow it whole, fudging a note here and there — as he‘s entitled — but delivering Beethoven’s own fantasizing vivid and intense. True, Brendel‘s much-publicized agonies over audience coughing and similar misbehavior — which he has now even celebrated by writing a poem about it — can make listeners at his concerts as nervous as he claims to be. Optimally silent to fulfill his ideal, an audience would then have to countenance his own repertory of moans ‘n‘ groans. It works both ways.

Magnus Lindberg came to town recently, with his wonderfully convoluted Cello Concerto that fellow Finn Esa-Pekka Salonen had conducted at Ojai in 1999 (with the amazing Anssi Karttunen as soloist), and a new work, Parada. That splendid music also appears next month on a Sony disc — led by Salonen but with London’s Philharmonia — with the Cello Concerto and two other orchestral works.

Lindberg, the same age as Salonen plus three days, grows into a world-class musical figure, strengthening his country‘s newly minted musical hegemony (with Kaija Saariaho to complete the triumvirate). From his early work called Kraft — with its musicians scattered around the playing area and its array of junk percussion — I might not have predicted his growth to such expressive mastery. He now tells me that Kraft was merely his shot across the bow, the kind of sensation-seeking music young composers have to write to proclaim their arrival on the scene. “There could never be a Kraft II,” he claims, “any more than there could ever be a Rite of Spring II.”

Parada is part of a trilogy of works bearing Spanish names — Cantigas, on the new Sony disc, and Feria, previously recorded, complete the set. Like Debussy’s Iberia, Lindberg says, the parts can be performed separately or as a suite lasting about 40 minutes. They aren‘t all that Spanish in sound or harmony, however. Whatever its derivation, Parada is a gorgeous 12 minutes of dark, resonant orchestral sound, beginning and ending with a progression (or “parade,” if you wish) of oozing, dusky harmonies. Here and there Stravinsky pops in; so does Debussy.

Alongside the Lindberg works at the Philharmonic there was Brahms — like chocolate sauce over herring. People perform those two early serenades, I suppose, because they’re Brahms — certainly not because they‘re any good. The A-major Serenade, which Salonen performed, is scored without violins and puts the winds up front, and it quacks a lot; you’d think that Brahms might have looked at a little Mozart to learn some basic wind usage. The performance was jaunty enough, I suppose, but Salonen‘s warm and flexible reading of the “Haydn” Variations, at the end, had a lot more to say. So, of course, did the music.

TIMIDLY PLANNED, HANDSOMELY EXECUTED, the Philharmonic’s “Schoenberg Prism” ended a couple of weeks ago with the one work most likely to draw cheers, the early Transfigured Night — originally a sextet but later expanded by the composer for string
orchestra. To these ears, the music makes a stronger impact in the original chamber version, the more so if you consider the Richard Dehmel poem — two lovers in self-confession mode on a moonlit landscape — that inspired it. (Join me in mourning the passing of the marvelous old Hollywood String Quartet­Plus recording, available until recently on the Testament label.) Esa-Pekka Salonen’s performance, with the Philharmonic’s full string complement, was moving enough, even if the moonbeams seemed to come from high-voltage transformers — as did John de Lancie’s feverish, overstressed reading of the Dehmel poem (with “SHOWN-berg” mispronounced in his intro) before the music began. From Martin Chalifour’s solo violin and Evan Wilson’s viola, however, you could hear genuine moonlight.

Pre-Schoenberg Schoenberg, pre-Mahler Mahler: I don’t know if this was the impulse in planning the program, but it made an interesting juxtaposition. Mahler’s Das klagende Lied was given complete, music begun at the tender age of 18, later drastically cut back, then partially restored, here presented in a conflation of first, second and third thoughts as edited by Reinhold Kubik and first performed in 1997. Mahler’s text is vintage German folk tale both grisly and Grimm — murder, betrayal, revenge, the works. Held captive in my seat for its hourlong duration — lacking center aisles, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is virtually escape-proof — I heard the work as a progression of embryonic Mahlerisms, and longed for an editor’s pencil to correct clunky turns of phrase that the composer, in his time of later greatness, would himself have suppressed.

Yet some purpose is served, I suppose,
in rubbing the noses of mature composers in the deeds of their youth. However wide the gap between the 25-year-old Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night of 1899 and, say, his Fourth Quartet of 37 years later, we learn from the earlier work that its composer landed in the musical world on both feet, as Mahler did not. Yet the Mahler, with Salonen’s yeoman feat in marshaling its massed chorus, oversize orchestra (including a whole ‘nother band out in the corridor) and enough vocal soloists to staff a fair-size opera company, did in its own elephantine way offer some prophecy of future greatness. Among the soloists there were two small members of the Tölzer Boys’ Choir, Masters Philipp Nowotny and Peter Mair, who sang the music of the flute that has been made of the bone of the murdered brother who — you get the idea — with such strength and right-on accuracy that after the concert I was surprised to find the building’s masonry still intact.

NO MASONRY IS SAFE, FOR THAT MATTER, in the presence of Evelyn Glennie, who came to the Philharmonic a week later to unleash her familiar bang-up skills on Joseph Schwantner’s 1992 Percussion Concerto. She’s an incredible sight, this barefoot Scots lass, dashing up- and downstage from one pile of hardware to another, whomping here, jiggling there. She’s a press agent’s dream, for her show-biz virtuosity and also for the way her well-known affliction — profound deafness since childhood — is dealt with on her Web site in double talk that both admits and refutes. She’s real, a media miracle . . .

. . . or would be, but for one problem. For all her claims to a place in the serious-concert world — commissioned scores including (!) 43 concertos, Grammys up the bazooty, TV documentaries and symposiums — I haven’t yet come across anything from her percussion-plus-orchestra repertory that justifies these claims. The Schwantner concerto is a case in point. At its core there’s a 20-minute, serviceable, not unattractive three-movement score for full orchestra, out of the same academic bone yard as John Harbison’s The Most Often Used Chords, which preceded it on the program here. On the edge, almost as a separate piece to be played simultaneously, there’s this ongoing hullabaloo for the percussionist, which serves mostly to distract the attention from the less-interesting other stuff. I hear this same dichotomy throughout the Glennie repertory, including the James MacMillan Veni, Veni Emmanuel that she played here a few years ago, with its extra layer of affected religiosity. Music for percussion — alone, or at least out front — has its place, and there are works by Bartók, Harrison, Cage and other blithe spirits to prove that. Glennie’s place — and I wish her all the fun she can find there — is outside this mainstream, a greatly attractive diversion to take your mind off the matter at hand. But dammit, she’s such fun to watch!

Miguel Harth-Bedoya, who conducted, had his moment after intermission, in an altogether splendid performance of Dvorák’s Seventh Symphony. You’ve probably read me on this work before; it is, I’ll admit, an obsession. Its forebear is basic Brahms, but the setting — the wonderful orchestral language with the soft shimmer of strings and the glistening winds and solo horn that pierce the Middle European murk; the shifts of harmony (at the end of the slow movement, for one instance of many) that turn your bones to jelly — stands apart, and above, anything in the Brahmsian orchestral legacy. The sublime conductor of this music, in my time anyhow, was Carlo Maria Giulini; my bones still quiver from a performance he gave, same orchestra, same stage, in the early 1980s. (The older Giulini recording, with the London Philharmonic on EMI, captures this sublimity but with a lesser orchestra; his later one, with Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw, is afflicted with an excess of the solemnity of his late years.) Harth-Bedoya came admirably close to the Giulini spirit. I had not heard him in European repertory before, but hope to soon again.

Some double talk from CalArts’ dean of music, David Rosenboom, attempted to locate that school’s Green Umbrella program within the citywide Schoenberg celebration: Olga Neuwirth because she hails from Schoenberg’s Vienna, John Cage despite Schoenberg’s refusal to teach him, Henry Brant for no discernible reason. The program ranged from unconscionable to unendurable: 50 minutes of Cage’s Sixteen Dances tentatively played and abominably danced in smart-aleck choreography by members of the school’s dance department, some contrapuntal chaos by Neuwirth, a depressingly blah song cycle by Earl Kim (who had at least worked with Schoenberg, but also with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt). It was already past 10 o’clock when the 89-year-old Henry Brant came on to lead — with his zany pantomime manner of conducting — groups of music makers spotted throughout the hall, some wandering and some stationary, in one of the spatial pieces that are his particular shtick in trade. As with Glennie, the music may not have been much, but the watching was glorious.

Pity the deprived soul whose spinal column cannot vibrate to the way Mozart uses clarinets and trombones in The Magic Flute. Shed a tear for the misguided misanthrope who fails to find the presence of God — by whatever name — in the music for Sarastro in that opera. Bemoan the unreconstructible rationalist who howls in horror as Schikaneder‘s plotline twists, this way now and that way then, as villains turn noble and heroines turn treacherous.

The current Los Angeles Opera production has made that last point, over which scholars have spilled ink by the tank load since the opera was new, particularly solemn and stirring. Tamino has come to Sarastro’s palace to rescue Pamina, who, he has been led to believe, has been kidnapped by Sarastro and held in durance vile. He is met at the entrance by one of Sarastro‘s priests, who queries him on his purpose and informs him that everything he has been led to believe is black is actually white, and that it will take some effort on his — Tamino’s — part to prove worthy of that knowledge. “When can I achieve this goal?” asks the impatient Tamino. The priest — who is identified in the score as “Speaker” although he only sings — answers, and on his sublime last line, a solemn cadence in the key of A minor, the entire plot pivots. “As soon as friendship‘s loving hand,” he sings, “leads you to our sacred band.” That line of music is repeated twice by an offstage chorus. Soft chords in the trombones enhance the solemnity. Within less than 90 seconds we have been confronted with a new plotline, and a new kind of music. It is a wrenching, extraordinary moment.

This revival of the company’s Flute — first seen in 1993, again in 1998 — is altogether successful; it runs through April 14. The Gerald Scarfe stage designs have lost none of their madcap luster. On the first night, Michael Schade — who had only a few hours previously stepped into the Philharmonic‘s performance of Mahler’s Das klagende Lied and taken on the tenor‘s tonsil-twisting music in that weird escapade — was the splendid Tamino. Rodney Gilfry’s Papageno has ripened into rich comic invention, Reinhard Hagen‘s Sarastro is worthy of his music, and the new Pamina, Andrea Rost, is a doll. Lawrence Foster’s conducting is, as is his norm, highly okay. The music that stayed with me the longest on opening night were those lines for the Speaker, eloquently sung by James Creswell, one of the company‘s resident artists and, obviously, a promising one.

That A-minor cadence demands your attention. Mozart had almost never composed in that key; never in the orchestral works or quartets, only once in an early piano sonata. Feverishly struggling in this last year of his life, he apparently reserved his foray into these dark and unfamiliar harmonic precincts for this simple yet intensely moving moment in his sublimely silly, wise comedy, with its still-argued-about mingling of the high-minded and the low-.

Every one of Mozart’s mature operas finds some new way to violate the practice of his time, whereby comedies should be funny and tragedies sad. The miraculous resolution at the end of The Marriage of Figaro, a sacred chorale in all but name, is the more astonishing for the comic hurly-burly just before; Fiordiligi‘s lovelorn confusion near the end of Cosi Fan Tutte, as she totters on the brink of infidelity, draws its tragic tone from the contrast with the ludicrous amorous entanglement that brings it on. But the circumstances of The Magic Flute — as an entertainment at Emanuel Schikaneder’s house of folk comedy, as opposed to the grander operas unfurled before higher-paying audiences — make its contrasts of tone even more jolting. A single night‘s entertainment that embraces Mr. and Mrs. Papageno feathering their nest, Sarastro’s invocation (fit for the mouth of God, wrote Bernard Shaw) and the heartbreak of Pamina‘s “Ach, ich fuhl’s” (Mozart‘s greatest aria, writes the scholarly Joseph Kerman) thus embraces a range of delectable jolts that no other single work, of Mozart’s time or of ours, can readily offer.

What, then, is The Magic Flute about? Part of its power lies in its multiplicity of answers. To Kerman, whose 1988 Opera as Drama remains obligatory reading, the change of direction “can be explained very simply and very happily on the assumption that Mozart himself insisted on it.” Whatever Mozart‘s original motivation in turning out a new titillation for his billiards buddy and fellow Freemason, something in his conscience pushed him to the realization that even Schikaneder’s crowd-pleasing plot deserved his best shot. That aforementioned small miracle, the A-minor cadence that diverts Tamino‘s path toward godly goals, launches the opera itself toward multitudinous kinds of greatness. “All the diversities,” writes Kerman, “of musical style, action, tone and mood are perfectly controlled to a single dramatic end.”

Every character is filled out with a full set of weaknesses as well as strengths. The saintly Sarastro maintains slaves and punishes their transgressions cruelly. Papageno, the sweet innocent, tells bare-faced lies, but still gets to share with Pamina a high-minded, philosophical duet on the meaning of love. For all his newly acquired bravery, Tamino must lean on Pamina for guidance through the trials of fire and water.

The Magic Flute fits the category of maiden-in-despair-heroically-rescued opera popular in its time both comically and seriously treated. Alongside this, we must also countenance the none-too-subtle allegory on the concerns and travails of the Freemason movement, which at the time was far more of a political force than it would later become. The psychoanalysts have had their day with the Flute as well: the interaction of Tamino and Pamina explainable in Jungian terms, the animus reaching out to the anima. Much can be made of the fact that Tamino’s at-first-sight passion for Pamina is motivated by a mere portrait — which, furthermore, ends up in the possession of Papageno when the two seekers actually reach Sarastro‘s palace. Musical scholars have grappled for centuries with the paradox that Schikaneder’s cobbled-together, endearing mess of a plot follows upon the opera‘s impeccably tidy and beautifully organized overture — which, in true Mozartian fashion, was composed only at the last minute, after the rest of the work was already on the performers’ music stands.

The abiding and most important genius of the work, however, is that none of this matters. As the beasts in the forest succumb to the enchantment of Tamino‘s magic flute, so do we all to Mozart’s. At the Music Center as well, Gerald Scarfe‘s nifty beasts are wonderfully in tune.

Here come the pianists; it’s odd how events tend to clump sometimes. Two weeks ago Peter Serkin and Marino Formenti played interesting, out-of-the-ordinary programs. This week hordes of pianists vie for Rachmaninoff Prize money in Pasadena, with mostly ordinary programs to be judged by mostly ordinary judges, as befits the time-honored rules of the piano-competition arena. Next week Murray Perahia and Alfred Brendel give recitals on the same night — an agonizing choice, but made easier because Brendel repeats his program in Irvine two nights later.

The last local major piano competition was also in Pasadena, at (sob!) Ambassador in 1993. It bore the name but also the faulty leadership of Ivo Pogorelich; at least the repertory was interesting and so was the roster of judges. But the winners: Where are they now — Michael Kieran Harvey? Edith Chen?

Now pushing 55, Peter remains ”the young Serkin“ so long as memories and recordings of father Rudolf‘s playing remain to warm the heart. In repertory Peter is very much his own man; his services to new music elevate him to honored status. Even so, I detected some of the elder Rudolf in the soft, pliant and warm-hearted Schoenberg half of Peter’s recent recital; the echoes of Brahms were underlined and hovered most audibly in the Opus 11 pieces; there was a shadowing of the French rococo in the witty, dry-point delivery of the Opus 25 Suite. Oddly, however, the Beethoven half could have used Rudolf‘s touch; the ethereal variations that end the Opus 109 Sonata were, in young Peter’s hands, chill, calculated — Schoenbergian, in fact.

Formenti remains uniquely ours; he has yet to appear as soloist anywhere else in the U.S. He came here first in 1998, with the excellent Klangforum Wien in the off-the-wall Resistance Fluctuations festival, gave spellbinding recitals at LACMA the next two years, participated in last year‘s Eclectic Orange, and returns in May as a major attraction at Ojai (and, would you believe, as assistant conductor for the L.A. Opera’s final double bill). Earlier this month he played at that implausible but ambitious venue, the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, where serious music-making alternates with Las Vegas, and where fire burns welcomingly in the lobby on even the warmest nights. The fare was lighter than Formenti‘s usual, and included his own elegant piano versions of songs from Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera. Most surprising was the First Piano Sonata of Shostakovich, a work almost completely unknown — there are two recordings, on obscure labels — and thus an interesting corollary to the Philharmonic‘s current observance of that composer and, as well, to other Shostakovian activities hereabouts. The Sonata dates from 1926, which places it between the piss-and-vinegar of the First Symphony and the rowdy-dow of the Second (which it more resembles); its one movement lasts about 18 minutes and teems with activism, most of it brutal.

Brutal and Shostakovich: The two seem mutually referential. The recent evening at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse that celebrated them both left me — and everyone I spoke to later — exhilarated and devastated. The 15th Quartet — dark, angry, morose — served as receptacle. The Emerson Quartet‘s gesture, as if to begin the work in normal chamber-concert configuration, merged immediately into a theatrical exegesis on Shostakovich’s struggle to maintain his artistic franchise, interwoven with the broader miasma vented upon the entire Soviet nation under Stalin. (Thus the Sonata that Formenti played had, for anyone fortunate enough to be at both events, somewhat set the stage: the vitality of a young nation‘s artistic aspirations so soon to be trammeled.)

Britain’s remarkable Theater of Complicity had joined the Emerson in creating this eveninglong interweaving of all the senses toward an overpowering end. One tends not to breathe even during ”normal“ performances of this work, Shostakovich‘s last quartet, music from his final illness composed in hospital. This collage, blending three decades of radio sound bites, taped reminiscences (including loving words from the great Rostropovich) and news reports, extended the power of the music as if no boundary existed among the spoken and musical messages gathered into an obsessive new stage work. At the end the Emersons returned and performed the Quartet complete — standing, even the cellist, as if in memoriam — and the music segued into darkness and silence. The Ojai Festival will end with that same music by the same performers. I would suggest you don’t try to drive home immediately afterward.

New music by Esa-Pekka Salonen, his two choral settings of poetry by Ann Jaderlund created for the Swedish Radio, formed the solid center of the Master Chorale‘s otherwise helter-skelter latest program. Rich, romantic music, these a cappella vignettes are ravishing especially in their resonant chording; Salonen’s first music for chorus already shows the hand of a master orchestrator. The pair of songs lasted some 12 minutes; they should have been performed twice.

Grant Gershon‘s overall programming idea was admirable enough: ”Expressions of Love“ through music of Schubert, Schumann, Poulenc and the tragically short-lived Lili Boulanger, sister of Nadia, using a smaller-than-usual ensemble and only Vicki Ray’s piano for substantial support. But three of Schubert‘s love-permeated men’s choruses were overpowered anyhow; this is music for a few warm-hearted guys around a piano, not a chorus on ramps, and the difference was audible. At the end came Poulenc‘s settings of old French songs, and these, too, were drained of intimacy and charm by too many singers standing stiffly and singing likewise. The printed program was a disaster: the wrong dates for Schubert (”1899–1963“!!!), a wrong poem among the song texts, the interweaving of the original texts and English translations so that neither was readable in the dimmed-out hall, typos galore. Those 12 minutes of Salonen’s new works aside (on which the major amount of rehearsal time had obviously been lavished), the evening was a sad deviation from the Master Chorale‘s newly reborn professionalism. Let’s just forget the whole thing.