So I've Heard

Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, played by the Vienna Philharmonic at Orange County‘s Segerstrom Hall last week, oozed along its murky path for almost exactly 90 minutes. Any one of Arnold Schoenberg’s piano pieces, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion four nights later, engaged Peter Serkin‘s mind and fingers for something like two minutes. Try to convince me that Bruckner’s maudlin meanderings contained 45 times the musical value of the Schoenberg, and I will counterpropose an ear exam or perhaps a brain scan.

This Bruckner stuff: It reaches out as if the Book of Revelation could somehow achieve translation into the mere mortality of a symphony orchestra. Its only revelation, however, is of self-importance at its least potent. In Vienna he is still revered; I have been to performances there where the ultimate tribute was for the audience to exit in silence. Yes, the Vienna Philharmonic, with its golden horns and its strings of purest silk, may have been ordained by God and his angels to transmute these textbook orchestrations and elementary exercises in invertible counterpoint into something resembling music. There is one 10-second purple patch in the slow movement of the Eighth — a rising scale crowned at the top by some celestial harp biz — that does provide momentary shivers for all of its six-bar duration. It hardly compensates for the other 89-plus minutes of agonizing boredom and — worse — predictability.

Even in Segerstrom‘s bland acoustical setting, the touted Vienna sound was immediately recognizable. All the better on the second of its three nights, when the orchestra’s awareness of the hall was more firmly fixed and the music at hand — Mozart, Schubert, Berg — more deserving of the care being lavished. Bernard Haitink is a serious, trustworthy leader. His management of the Schubert Ninth filled both time and space with caressing, propulsive, immensely lovable sounds — 53 minutes (even without the prescribed first- and last-movement repeats), and every one of them precious. The Mozart ”Haffner“ Symphony, however, was somewhat compromised by an overlarge string contingent that muddied the work‘s chamber-music balance.

Alban Berg’s Opus 6 orchestral pieces — ”Berg‘s confessions to Dr. Freud,“ as Esa-Pekka Salonen described them last year in a pre-concert talk — came over in wondrous clarity. At the end there was booing; Segerstrom’s drab acoustics may damage the sound from the stage, but the noises out in the hall — cell phones, candy wrappers, audience reactions — carry all too well. With Orange County‘s recent cultural advances, largely due to the Philharmonic Society’s enlightened bookings, of which the Vienna stint was one, there remain pockets of resistance to the artworks of the just-concluded century, even to Berg‘s pre-atonal music of 1915. (There are evidently pockets of resistance to the 19th century as well; the O.C. Register’s Tim Mangan has sent along a reader‘s letter grousing about the Berg pieces and then also finding the ”Shubert [sic] very long and really tiresome.“) The clouds of war persist.

From Vienna, too, there came H.K. (Heinz Karl) Gruber, who claims the Franz Gruber of ”Silent Night“ as ancestor, and whose twinkling, nose-thumbing music lies far more in the Viennese lineage of Schubert than that of Bruckner. Frankenstein is his best-known work, although the EMI recording under Franz Welser-Most is no longer listed: a weirdly captivating half-hour pastiche of pop and serious with a ”chansonnier“ reading kiddie poetry about monsters and an orchestra of toy and adult instruments. Aerial is Gruber’s 22-minute trumpet concerto from 1999, and however you take its title, you‘d probably be right. He wrote it for the airborne talents of the phenomenal Swedish trumpeter Hakan Hardenberger, who performed it here — and how! — with Daniel Harding and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. This piece is also something of a pastiche. Its outside influences include Emily Dickinson’s poetry and Fred and Ginger‘s dancing; the soloist gets to do some fancy switching through an array of sophisticated trumpets of various sizes plus a kind of Swedish folk trumpet fashioned from a cow’s horn and sounding not unlike a cow‘s moo. (As an encore, Hardenberger played a solo on that instrument alone.)

Aerial is all over the place, delightfully so. The trumpeter gets to sing along with his playing; his solos bend away from ”normal“ tonalities. I haven’t heard a new piece in a long time that so reflected its composer‘s sheer joy in creating it, nor its soloist’s exhilaration in his own virtuosity. The piece is full of tricks, but also full of music. Charles Ives‘ Central Park in the Dark preceded it on the program, a splendid programming touch — two pieces composed 90 years apart, each driven by the abrasive power of its off-kilter creative energy. The well-worn awfulness of Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben finally brought the evening back to Earth, but not enough to erase memories of the high flying that had happened before.

High flying . . . the California EAR Unit has been doing just that for 20 years as of now. Last week‘s concert at LACMA celebrated its anniversary in a procession through the hall with kazoos and flashing lights and a retrospective program of typical EAR Unit pieces. Former EARfolk Jim, Art and Gloria were on hand to join Dorothy, Marty, Robin, Erika, Vicki and Amy; neither they nor their music seems to have aged much. An old sampler film of the group’s music making, back when Amy‘s hair was long and Dorothy’s was short, proved the longevity of their spirit.

The EAR Unit‘s activities assert, above all, that inventive new music can, if properly nurtured, maintain the power to pound the emotions and tickle the ear, sometimes simultaneously. Fred Rzewski’s 1971 Coming Together, the program‘s earliest piece, bore out that premise: an insistent work that knits phrases from a letter by an Attica Prison inmate (who would later be martyred) into a shattering instrumental background. So did the most recent, the 1998 Girlfriend by Bang-on-a-Can’s Julia Wolfe, an interweave of dirgelike instrumental music and horrifying sounds of traffic accidents. The crowd at LACMA that night was not as large as it should have been, but that‘s a constant problem at the museum, with its zero promotional budget. It’s a source of amazement and joy that these concerts — and groups like the EAR Unit itself — survive at all.

Franz Schubert’s G-Major String Quartet haunts me once again. It‘s never far from my thoughts, but last week’s performance — by the Philharmonia Quartett Berlin in the “Historic Site” of the Queen Mary‘s gorgeous Grand Salon (a historic sight) — brings it to the front of my skull. What amazing music!

It dates from June 1826, the start of Schubert’s final two-year creative rush that we can marvel at but never fully understand. Its immediate contemporaries include another huge, inscrutable G-major work — the so-called “Fantaisie-Sonata” — and the two trios for piano, violin and cello. Any one of these gives the lie to the old bromide about Schubert‘s mastery of melody at the expense of logical structure; the G-major Quartet, however, looks the furthest ahead, toward other musical languages of composers who were not even born in 1826.

Just the opening couple of minutes, for example, with the one tiny melodic nugget sliding down sequentially from G to F to C, prefigures the way Anton Bruckner, six decades later, would use the same device as an obsession ad nauseam. The tremolos, which build the sound of four strings out into a terrifying quasi-orchestral shiver, will also resonate throughout the Brucknerian canon; check out the opening measures of nearly every one of his symphonies.

Even more amazing to my ears is the richness and variety of Schubert’s harmonic language here, and the way it creates the structure that sustains the music‘s grand design — 45 minutes the other night, even without the specified first-movement repeat. Again, the premise is spelled out in the first measures, the opening G-major chord that swells out to a fortissimo G minor. One of my favorite moments in all music comes in the way that passage returns at the recapitulation 12 or so minutes later. Now the major-minor order is reversed, and played this time in a distant, mystery-laden pianissimo, with a soft new melody for the first violin that wraps itself with a benevolent smile around the proceedings.

That majorminor vacillation becomes, in fact, the principal obsession throughout. Each of the four movements is built around the device, each time differently, each time unmistakably. No composer before had tried, or even felt the need, to unify a multimovement work in this way. Beethoven’s C-sharp minor Quartet (also composed in 1826, by the way) achieves a kind of unity by running the movements together and by including quotations from the first movement in the finale. Schubert‘s method here is more organic, with the unifying element embedded in all four movements.

It isn’t the formal practices that elevate this G-major quartet, however; leave that for the thesis writers (including my own from UC, 1952). It‘s the fearsome energy of the piece, the clash among the varieties of its melodic devices — now bristling in the shrieks of pain in the slow movement, now soothingly Schubertian (you might say) midway in the scherzo. It holds you captive throughout its enormous length, an expanse made necessary by the many things the music has to say, the many ways Schubert has devised for saying them, and the sheer — if sometimes forbidding — beauty of the work as a whole. The Berliners, all members of that city’s Philharmonic, reacted to all of this at full strength. Their program also included other masterpieces large and small: the first of Mozart‘s quartets dedicated to Haydn and the darling little Italian Serenade of Hugo Wolf — both also in G major, as it happened, but each with something different on its mind.

Another Austrian Franz has been heard from recently, Herr Welser-Most of Linz, who guest-conducted the Philharmonic the week before, and had me biting my tongue all the way home for the mean things I’ve said and written all my life about Jan Sibelius‘ First Symphony. There was a cute irony in operation here, although it doesn’t really matter. Welser-Most takes over the Cleveland Orchestra next fall, in a post that Cleveland‘s management had been openly but vainly wooing Esa-Pekka Salonen to accept. So now he, Cleveland’s second choice, comes to town with a typical Salonen program — Sibelius, Haydn, Kaija Saariaho — and makes it work. (He and Salonen are scheduled to swap podiums — for one week only — two seasons from now.)

The Sibelius got what you might call a Viennese-classic performance, immensely spirited, its dynamic contrasts honed to a cutting edge, the orchestral balance tilted so that thematic material emerged clear and bright, with the underlying murk nicely under control, the spooky opening clarinet solo played by Michele Zukovsky as if from another planet. Herbert von Karajan, echt Austrian, used to conduct Sibelius that way at the start of his career, although the Viennese I knew as a student there considered it a sacrilege that he played that music at all. But he was able to make sense out of it, and now Welser-Most comes along with, apparently, the same ability.

Saariaho‘s Du Cristal was first played here under Salonen (and recorded on Finland’s Ondine label) in 1990. She wrote it while at UC San Diego, rubbing shoulders with composers Brian Ferneyhough and Roger Reynolds, whose stark, unyielding academicism the piece somewhat reflects. Its glassy, crystalline sounds are wonderful in themselves; compared, however, to the music Saariaho now writes — the three compositions led by Salonen on the recent Sony disc and the haunting harmonies of the opera L‘Amour de Loin, which Santa Fe will produce next summer — there is something not quite lovely about this music.

Andrew Shulman, the Philharmonic’s about-to-leave principal cellist, was soloist in Haydn‘s D-major Concerto. I am bored by this work, as I am by little else of Haydn; Shulman played it as if he shared my feelings. The concerto has too little “cello” sound; the solos all lie too high to capture the eloquence that Beethoven was able to bring forth from the instrument in his sonatas of 25 years later. The finale sings of “gathering nuts in May,” and that’s rather pretty. It‘s a long time in coming, however.

If you were confused by the title of last week’s article, so was I. I wrote about Tchaikovsky and called it “The Grim Weeper,” not “Reaper” as printed. Where was Elmer Fudd when we needed him?

There used to be a music critic in town who could never write about the music of Piotr Ilitch (“Pete”) Tchaikovsky without throwing in the pet epithet “slush pump.” It rendered the critic predictable, which is the worst fate that can befall anyone in this line of work. It was also unfair. In the last couple of weeks we’ve had our share of Tchaikovsky – the Sixth Symphony at the Philharmonic and Eugene Onegin at Opera Pacific in Costa Mesa – and in neither work could I detect even enough slush to prime a pump, let alone set it into full gushing activity.

Eugene Onegin stands alone. Alexander Pushkin’s soaring verses virtually invented
romantic Russian-ness; Tchaikovsky’s music
enhanced their melancholic, lyric shape and served as a bridge to the intense humanness of Chekhov’s dramas. The young Onegin, tampering at will and without remorse with the lives of those around him, will age under Chekhov’s all-knowing pen into the Trigorin of The Seagull; Pushkin’s lovelorn Tatyana pulls herself out of her funk after Onegin’s rejection, as Chekhov’s Nina cannot.

Nor, unfortunately, could the earnest forces at Opera Pacific, whose courageous lunge at the high passions and the subtle shadings of Tchaikovsky’s marvelous opera –
the first full-scale staging of the work in this area, unless memory deceives, in many a decade – fell fatally wide of the mark. A program note by Colin Graham, who directed and whose dossier is long and distinguished, reflected his awareness of the opera’s antecedents, of Tchaikovsky’s efforts to frame the insecurities of his characters by casting the opera with students, of the efforts of the great Stanislavsky to preserve in his production the very overtones in the work that the staging in Costa Mesa willfully ignores. I had to think back to the small-scale, rather slapdash Onegin that a touring company from St. Petersburg brought to the Cerritos Center last season, with its handful of scenery and its eager, young, not-quite-ready cast; that hapless evening, it now seems in retrospect, was actually a more accurate rendering of those overtones than Opera Pacific’s elephantine escapade.

There was little of Pushkin/Tchaikovsky’s “cold dandy” in Lucio Gallo’s tremolo-ridden Onegin, who stalked the stage in a diabolical manner more likely to send maidens to hide
under the bed than to pen love letters. Hugh Smith’s hulking loppus of a Lensky was hardly the amorous adolescent of Tchaikovsky’s ideals, although he hit some brave high notes in his big aria and drew the evening’s largest hand. Mary Mills was a pretty if passionless Tatyana, who sang her moving “letter aria” as if composing it on a word processor. Guest conductor Stephen Lord’s uneventful leadership was a step or two down from the standards Opera Pacific has been lately setting under John DeMain; Pier Luigi Samaritani’s sets would serve dozens of heavy, melodramatic operas but encapsulated little of the bittersweet elegance of this one special masterpiece. The opera was said to be sung in Russian, as it may indeed have been. Some bits from Pushkin’s poetry were flashed on the scrim between scenes, reduced to English doggerel; that, in fact, somewhat epitomized the treatment accorded the entire work.

When Bernard Rands taught composition at UC San Diego, his music was frequently performed hereabouts; the recent revival of his Canti del Sole reminded us of what we’ve been missing. There is a special magic about anthology pieces – Britten’s Serenade, Berio’s Coro come to mind – as the composers’ choice of texts and the way their inner music becomes outwardly musicked evokes the poetic impulse on two levels. Rands’ cycle of three such works – sun, moon and eclipse – each involve a solo voice against an ensemble; each seems flung out into limitless, mysterious, resonant space.

Maybe the “sun” songs are the best of the set, although that could be only because I’ve heard them most recently – at last week’s Green Umbrella concert, in fact. The shivery opening owes something to Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloë sunrise, but the happenings in the lustrous, insinuating music are as widespread as the dozen or so poems that are its substance. Small glints of light seem to dance through the work, some from the 11-member instrumental ensemble, some from the solo singer, some from the ring of the poetry – Baudelaire, Montale, D.H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas and more. These were elegantly sung by the indestructible Jonathan Mack, surrounded by
audible sunshine from the players of USC’s Thornton Contemporary Music Ensemble led by Donald Crockett.

Music for an ensemble of eight cellos, and nothing more, may suggest an expanse of creaks and groans; works on this program by Kaija Saariaho and Augusta Read Thomas – both inspired by the look and feel of snow – delivered far more. Saariaho’s Neiges told of vast, fog-dappled snowscapes; the Blizzard in Paradise of Thomas (wife of Bernard Rands, if it matters) brought the weather somewhat closer, with gusts of stinging snow buffeting the hardy voyager. USC’s music department, apparently, abounds in fearless cellists.

Photo by Mats LundquistFinally, and not a moment too soon, the Philharmonic has gotten around to Sofia Gubaidulina. Her Offertorium – composed in 1980, twice revised since then, dedicated to Gidon Kremer, who also made the first recording – remains one of the brainiest and most challenging works of our time. Guest conductor Alan Gilbert led a performance best described as heroic; Philharmonic concertmaster Martin Chalifour’s execution of the solo violin part was of like quality. The audience last Thursday night didn’t quite get it; the applause was sporadic and paltry. This is music that needs to be lived with and puzzled over.

It makes a fascinating study. Bach’s Musical Offering provided the theme and the title; it was smart of Gilbert to preface the performance with Anton Webern’s reworking of some of the same music. The theme itself, legend has it, was furnished to Bach by Prussia’s King Frederick II. Legend or not, those 20 notes, with their dissonant downward leap balanced by an elegant chromatic resolution, are a fountainhead of musical inspiration, as Bach, Webern and Gubaidulina handsomely demonstrate. Gubaidulina’s way with those notes is by some distance the most savage.

At first hearing, she stops just short of completion. Over the next 40 or so minutes the theme is further reduced, torn apart, swirled through a huge orchestra that includes a vast battery of percussion. Through all this brutal fragmentation, one unifying factor remains, that dissonant downward leap; it serves as a DNA that maintains the tortured face of Bach visible through the cataclysm. Now and then – but not often – we are allowed a breath or two, as the music recedes and the solo violinist takes flight in wild cadenzas. For the most part, we hang on as best we can, faced with this torrent that manages at once to be both obsessive and rhapsodic.

I wrote about Gubaidulina last November, as several recordings of her music appeared simultaneously. Kremer’s recording of Offertorium is still available, on Deutsche Grammophon, and I urge it upon you, as a piece of wonderfully stirring – and, yes, irritating – music, but also as a fascinating study on the way a composer, in the course of establishing herself as a contemporary voice, learns to profit by the living relics of the past. If I were running a school for composers – no thanks, however – I would assign every student the task of carving some kind of new music out of Bach’s (or King Frederick’s) pregnant theme.

For the 35-year-old Gilbert the concert marked a triumphant return; he had previously stood in for the ailing Roger Norrington in May 1998. On the podium he is immensely likable: his beat strong and clear, his manner free from gadgetry. The Tchaikovsky “Pathétique” – made clear-headed, strong and agreeably drool-free – ended the program, and drew the deserved cheers that the Gubaidulina had been denied. I want to write more about Tchaikovsky next week, after Opera Pacific’s Eugene Onegin.

Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum, which filled the air of UCLA’s Royce Hall the next night with mysterious shimmer and shimmering mystery, dates from about the same time as Offertorium. Both are by composers oppressed by the yoke of Soviet censorship who achieved their current high regard only after leaving their respective homelands. I would not belabor any further similarities, but hearing those two overpowering works on successive nights has been beneficial to my outlook on life, not to mention my metabolism. The Te Deum came after two big choral pieces by Vivaldi, and rounded out an evening of spellbinding music-making by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra under Tönu Kaljuste. They have been here before, but not nearly often enough.

Pärt has written about his music as comparable to “white light, which contains all colors,” with the “spirit of the listener” as prism. This Te Deum is, indeed, a creation fashioned out of color. It emerges from a darkness dimly perceived; its harmonies go on for minutes as a kind of bleached-out gray, pierced now and then by a single diatonic chord like a flash of gold. There is a swatch of dark red now and then, but not often and not for long. At the end a small group of voices intones a threefold “Sanctus,” many times repeated ever more softly, fading finally to silence; if there is a more beautiful ending in all music it doesn’t come immediately to mind. (The Gubaidulina also ends extraor dinarily, by the way, like a sudden halt at the brink of a precipice.)

The Estonians are a marvelous performing force, as their many discs – including the Te Deum on ECM – emphatically prove. The Pärt work called for a string orchestra with a prepared piano and with a deep bass note – on tape, played on an Aeolian wind-harp – serving as ground zero; two Vivaldi psalm settings used the chorus and orchestra (with a couple of winds and a small portative organ) split into two answering groups, with vocal soloists drawn from the 28-member chorus. I always think of Estonia’s flag – white, black and a particularly clean, cold blue – when I hear that country’s music: slightly cool, efficient, modest. I must go there sometime.

Meanwhile, back at the Philharmonic . . . The orchestra has a splendid addition in its recently appointed assistant conductor Yasuo Shinozaki, who had his innings the previous week as replacement for the ailing Hans Vonk in an all-Beethoven program. Short and not quite sylphlike, Shinozaki cuts a dynamic figure on the podium, including a tendency toward jumping at moments of high enthusiasm. He conducted a terrific program: a big, hair-raising Leonore No. 3 that whipped up a fair amount of tension leading to the “rescuing” offstage trumpet call; a final “Pastoral” Symphony nicely paced and, again, remarkably propulsive toward its great, stormy climax. André Watts’ unevenful saunter through the Fourth Piano Concerto was the evening’s only disappointment. At a mere 55, with so much of an illustrious career in his résumé, he should not yet be mangling as many notes, and missing as much of the poetry in this music, as he did that night.

Happily adrift in the enchanting pseudo-Renaissance fakery of UCLA’s Powell Library, my ears coddled and cajoled by the authentic Renaissance harmonies of Francesco Landini‘s music interspersed with the raptures of Dante’s poetry, I beheld my own kind of vision. It revealed to me the golden message that some things very old in years are actually very new in spirit. The next day, in the humdrum realism of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center, that same vision showed itself in reverse, as the very new music of Henryk Gorecki proffered the message that some things never change.

Landini and Dante, the musician-poet and the poet-musician: The one reached beyond the agony of blindness to shape musical forms exactly the color of their poetry; the other translated the agony of love‘s rejection into words as close to music as words ever get. Anonymous 4, in one of the Da Camera Society’s bewitching “Historic Sites” events, filled the evening with the high art of their time: 15 of Landini‘s ballate — songs mostly about love’s joys, love‘s torments — alternating with short readings from La Vita Nuova, Dante’s account of his early love for the fragile and unattainable Beatrice. Perhaps neither composer nor poet envisioned his words and his music sung by four women to large audiences, in rhythms and pitches exactly fixed by serious musicology and with a vibrance that accomplished a blend of the antiquarian and the high-spirited contemporary; their times didn‘t always call for optimism. The best early-music ensembles of today, to which Anonymous 4 definitely belongs, make of their chosen fields an entertainment so joyous, so contemporary — and yet so “honest” in the best sense — that years and dates and footnotes in dusty tomes no longer matter.

A great wave swept through the music of the 14th century. Composers in the cathedrals had found ways to enhance the chants of the liturgy with all kinds of interesting harmonic devices: two or three lines sung simultaneously but with different texts, or the almost dancelike virtuosity of the counterpoints composed at Notre-Dame in Paris. Then the pope had stamped his papal foot, church music was ordered back to its pristine one-line-at-a-time chastity, and even the most devout composers went over to the secular side. The 150 or so surviving love songs of Landini (c. 1335–1397) detail the shape of that wave, from the austere expanse of the first works to what we begin to recognize as the early stirrings of classical harmonies in the mature songs. Dante instilled the human heart into his poetry; Van Eyck’s Adoration revealed the way to create human perspective on a flat painted surface; Landini‘s harmonies brought passion into music. Early or late, for a single voice or four voices intertwined, what still amazes us in Landini’s wonderful repertory is the closeness in mood between the tunes and the poetry they enhance — most of it by ——–
AUTHORs whose names no longer exist. Half a millennium before the flowering of art song in the hands of Schubert, that same sensitivity had guided another pen to other kinds of music. Anonymous 4, by the way, has recorded this Landini garland on a Harmonia Mundi disc called The Second Circle.

Even more years separate this music from Gorecki‘s Miserere, the amazing work for unaccompanied chorus that began the Master Chorale concert a day later. Here also, however, was music put together with ages-old techniques. As the composers around Notre-Dame created their massive musical designs out of melodic lines piled atop one another and sung simultaneously, Gorecki carries the process to a gut-busting climax. The lowest men’s choral voices begin the chant, in solemn, measured tones, outlining a sense of some deep, grievous minor key. At the point where their chant seems wrung out of passion, the next-higher voices enter, their chant paralleling the first but in some other key. One by one, section by section, the chorus takes up the chant, and their simultaneity becomes less a line and more an aura. Out in the audience — in the ears of this audience member, at least — the effect is of a huge screw implacably tightened. Twenty minutes later, when the full chorus has been engaged, the full text of the Miserere prayer bursts forth; the screw, which, you‘d have thought, had been given its final wrench, continues to turn.

The work dates from 1981. Its inspiration was the oppression by the Polish Communist government of the Solidarity labor movement; it was suppressed in Poland until 1987. Its performance here, on a program that also included Mozart’s Requiem, as noted last week, is further reason to rejoice in the Master Chorale‘s new lease on life under Grant Gershon’s leadership. Every major city has some kind of resident chorus, good for an occasional Messiah or a Ninth. It seems as though the Master Chorale now aims higher, with a repertory old and new comparable to the breadth the Philharmonic‘s programming attains (or should). Esa-Pekka Salonen has written a piece for the group’s next concert (March 16), which will also be recorded on its own label. The age of enlightenment may not be so far off.

Last week‘s piano music came in kibbles: 60 — count ’em, 60 — piano works by that many composers, none more than 60 seconds long, played by Guy Livingston at LACMA in a concert more agreeable than my description suggests; and small pieces by Hungarian composers played by Mark Robson at a “Piano Spheres” concert in Pasadena titled, alas, “Ligeti Split.”

Livingston also has his “serious” side as a pianist; Chopin‘s “Minute” Waltz, as the sole encore, suggested as much. Most of these short pieces, each commissioned and paid for by a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, subsided into a pleasant haze. A couple of parody pieces — Bill Bolcom of Tchaikovsky, Anders Jallen of Webern — rose above the horizon; so did Moritz Eggert‘s Hammerklavier XI, a collage of 60 pieces one second long; so did Pierre Boulez’s letter of rejection, which Livingston set to his own music. What made the concert more than bearable, however, was Livingston‘s own welcoming manner, including brief chats from an easy chair after every 10 pieces. You can’t run down a concert in which the performer is so adept at projecting his own pleasure at what he‘s doing.

Robson’s offerings were sterner stuff but equally fragmentary: sets of tiny pieces by Gyorgy Kurtag and Bela Bartok; three of Gyorgy Ligeti‘s fantastic Etudes and the tiny, whimsical movements of his Musica Ricercata; Zoltan Kodaly’s 1918 Piano Pieces (more interesting than anything else I know by this Hungarian also-ran); and, of course, some Liszt. Robson earns his daily bread as rehearsal coach for the L.A. Opera and his ticket to heaven in his uncommonly interesting recital programming; his performance last season of Messiaen‘s Vingt Regards merits a worthy place in local annals. So, of course, does the entire “Piano Spheres” series, the brainchild of the venerable Leonard Stein, the father of us all.

Photo Courtesy Opera PacificI had harsh words a few weeks ago about the key of D minor, as exploited in singularly unappealing works by Brahms and Schoenberg. But then came Mozart in that key: the demons rampant through Don Giovanni at Opera Pacific in Costa Mesa, the Requiem as sung by the Master Chorale at the Music Center – music familiar and beloved, packed with new things to be discovered at each new hearing.

Keys mattered in Mozart’s time, for reasons both practical and ethical. Wind and brass instruments were tuned to particular keys. Mozart wrote a concerto and quintet for a solo clarinet tuned to A, and there is an A-major episode for clarinets, in the slow movement of the K. 488 piano concerto, that could break your heart. The martial majesty of the “Jupiter” Symphony and the “Elvira Madigan” Piano Concerto is enhanced by the trumpets in C. Beyond that, composers attached expressive aspects to certain keys. In Haydn’s string quartets the slow movements with complex key signatures – F-sharp major in Opus 76 No. 5, for example – always seem unusually profound. (My local Trader Joe’s has that movement on its in-store music, so I tend to linger when shopping.)

The sweep that begins Don Giovanni – the overture, the servant Leporello’s monologue, Donna Anna’s pursuit and the Don’s murder of the Commandant, an unbroken sequence like nothing in any opera before its time – revolves around D minor (with a small diversion into D major for the goodhearted, un-profound servingman); when the Commandant’s ghost returns to extract vengeance at the end, the music is once again in D minor. During the nearly three intervening hours, Mozart has carefully avoided the key, so that its return enhances the shock of that final scene.

You may think that you don’t notice matters like key changes and key returns; believe me, you do. You also shiver a little – you do, fess up! – at the violence in Mozart’s mastery of the sudden harmonic shift: the moment in Act 2 when Leporello throws off his disguise, and the music for the others (who have cornered him in the belief that he’s the Don) takes a sudden lurch into the “wrong” key. You shiver once again during the Requiem, when the chorus at the end of “Confutatis” sounds a series of wrenching, dissonant chords that form a ladder up to the infinitely sad D minor of the “Lacrimosa.” The realization that you’re hearing the notes and harmonies from Mozart’s last hours on his deathbed only deepens the poignancy of those measures. Minutes before that extraordinarily moving music, you have been hammered upon by the “Dies irae,” the most harrowing unleashing I know of the demons who haunt the key of D minor.

Costa Mesa’s Don Giovanni had its virtues, plus a few minor vices. It struck me as sheer willfulness for director Thor Steingraber to have his Giovanni pull out a pistol to finish off the Commandant, while Mozart’s orchestra clearly defines the whiplash thrusts of dueling swords. Small bits like that through the evening did put my teeth on edge. But there were Christine Goerke’s agonized, smoldering Anna to make amends, and a few comic touches in Pamela Armstrong’s Elvira to soften the proto-Freudian hysteria of that role. William Shimell’s Giovanni was
somewhat stiff, while Kyle Ketelsen’s young, handsome and infinitely insinuating Leporello made one wish that he and his master had swapped roles in Act 2, not merely cloaks. Best of all was John DeMain’s musical leadership, fleet in momentum and with the crucial ensemble work beautifully balanced. Opera Pacific grows apace.

So does the Master Chorale under the born-again leadership of Grant Gershon. Henryk Górecki’s Miserere began the program, a stunning piece stunningly performed and worth more space than a mere afterthought in a Mozart outpouring.

(Sit tight; there’s always next week.) The Requiem was capitally performed: dark, menacing and powerful. The “Dies irae” lifted me out of my seat; those aforementioned harmonies in the “Confutatis” sent the requisite shivers; William Booth’s solo trombone in the “Tuba mirum,” meant by Mozart to waken the dead, could have done just that. The edition was that of Robert Levin, who has clarified many orchestral passages in Franz Süssmayr’s flawed completion of his master’s unfinished score. Most striking is Levin’s addition of a fugal peroration – found in some other Mozart manuscript – to bring the “Lacrimosa” to a far more shapely ending.

Robert Levin himself had been in town the week before, to perform Mozart’s C-minor Piano Concerto (K. 491) with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and to Do His Thing. He is a recognized authority on 18th-century performance practice, especially on the matter of a performer’s improvisation on a composer’s written-down notes in the body of, say, a concerto, and most of all in the cadenza at the end of a movement where the soloist is expected to pick up the substance of that movement and run with it. Levin’s cadenzas for K. 491 were full of the right kinds of tricks; the one for the first movement did run on a bit, but apparently orchestras in Mozart’s day didn’t get to think about overtime. (Lars Vogt also played – or should I say punched out – K. 491 with the Philharmonic at a recent concert under Yakov Kreizberg, in a performance more dutiful than beautiful.)

Levin is also given to lecturing, and to demonstrating his findings and theories; his ranking among scholars, I am told, is high. Now, however, he has also decided to go public with his act. The audience at the LACO concert was given slips of music paper and asked to write down themes that Levin would pick out and improvise upon in the manner that had brought fame and fortune to Mozart and, later, to Beethoven. This was all fun as far as it went, but that was too far. For a performer today to indulge in an improv à la Mozart is something of a cheat; there is too much of the Mozartian language in common circulation to expect something new and original from this kind of act. After all, Mozart and Beethoven were improvising from their awareness of the music of their own time; the counterpart would be for Levin, or you or me, to improvise à la John Adams or Boulez. Mr. Levin’s deserved acclaim has, I fear, left him rather full of himself, and that distracted from his stage presence all evening – although less so in the final work, the marvelous Two-Piano Concerto (K. 365) that he performed with Jeffrey Kahane, and for which Mozart had written down every note, cadenzas included.

“Pretty wild stuff,” said Esa-Pekka Salonen of the two early Shostakovich symphonies that formed the substance of the Philharmonic program two weeks ago, and pretty wild stuff they proved to be . . . wild, unruly and awful. If ever there were a case of inferior music surviving on the strength of its creator‘s eventual renown, the second and third symphonies form the perfect paradigm.

Yet there is a thread through these works that is worth our attention, and which the Philharmonic’s current journey along the Shostakovich legacy — which began with the First Symphony and the first three string quartets earlier last month (which I missed while wallowing in London‘s John Adams festival) — fills in the outline of an artist’s life unique for its interplay of light and darkness. Whether you accept the contrived “memoir” of Solomon Volkov‘s much-challenged Testimony — and I do not — the rises and falls of Shostakovich’s life as an artist are powerfully sketched in the music itself. It first takes shape with the cheeky energy and lyric power of the amazing First Symphony of the 19-year-old schoolboy, music as unbeholden to tradition or environment as, say, the song literature of Franz Schubert‘s adolescence. Then Russia is swept into a vortex of political optimism and creative energy: Pudovkin and Eisenstein’s films, Mayakovsky‘s poetry, the still-young Shostakovich. The next two symphonies virtually explode on the stage, with an undigested mass of naive patriotism and ambitious but clumsy dissonant counterpoint. The young composer has heard the music from the West — Schoenberg, jazz, Hindemith — and wants it all for himself as well.

Both symphonies had previously lain untouched by the Philharmonic, understandably so. Next should come the Fourth, which the orchestra has played (twice in my time here), but that has been postponed until next year. There is awfulness in this work, too — at twice the length of the Second or Third — but it is mitigated by a far firmer control of momentum; it will be worth revisiting. The popular Fifth turns up on February 20: presented not by Salonen, who has publicly declared his distaste for the work, but by a visiting Russian orchestra under Philharmonic auspices.

The First String Quartet dates from 1935, the year of the Fourth Symphony, but the Second came only 10 years later. Along with Alan Chapman’s splendid talk before the two symphonies, four Philharmonic members played the Second Quartet, an impossibly dreary work with an interminable set of academic variations as its finale. There, as with the symphonies, Shostakovich still had far to go. The last of the 15 quartets, consisting of nothing but slow movements breathing in and out with accents of pain and resignation, turns up at UCLA next month (March 20–23): the Emerson Quartet, with Britain‘s performance-art ensemble Complicite, in a complicity titled “Noise of Time.”

All this adds up to a rewarding excursion into the creative mind of one of the past century’s towering figures, whose greatest works still challenge our own imagination as they once did his. The memory of Shostakovich disturbs us all; what remains beyond challenge is this: In a country beset by turmoil, and during a time of further turmoil and redefinition worldwide, one composer chose to work within musical boundaries — symphony, string quartet, concerto — established generations before his time, and found new ways to give them meaning. However timid the Philharmonic planners may have been in the matter of Schoenberg, the Shostakovich inundation should be a sequence of delighted rediscoveries.

The Philharmonic‘s Green Umbrella concerts turned 20 last week, and two of their founders — Ernest Fleischmann, who started them and later dreamed up the cute title, and Bill Kraft, who led the first few years of concerts — were on hand at Zipper to bask in deserved applause. Later dignitaries — former composers-in-residence John Harbison and Steven Stucky and current superstar Esa-Pekka Salonen — were there as well, and all four composers conducted music of their own. What’s remarkable about these concerts isn‘t merely the strength of their service to important new music, although the program booklet’s five-page, double-column, fine-print list of repertory is itself staggering; it‘s the fact that they still exist. Other orchestras — the New York Philharmonic and Boston Symphony most notably — have tried similar ventures and closed them down within a year or two.

There was an interesting subtext to last week’s concert. Bill Kraft‘s Double Trio of 1966 was the earliest music on the program, and also the most abrasive — beautifully made out of interrelations between dissimilar groups of instruments, but gritty and unwelcoming even so. Harbison’s 1997 Concerto, in which oboe and clarinet wound silken ribbons around each other and around a string ensemble, tended by comparison to sit on your lap and tickle your ears. So did Stucky‘s brand-new Etudes for, of all things, solo recorder and ensemble, with Michala Petri’s burbling solos the kind of music you never want to end. Finally there was Salonen‘s Five Images After Sappho, already familiar from previous performances and the new Sony recording, its long lyric lines sung, once again, by the exquisite Laura Claycomb. I won’t finger this one program as proof that all music is heading toward a state of C major; all four works included, among their other graces, a high regard for a listener‘s intelligence. So much was this the case, in fact, that the memory of that night still lingers.

Curious indeed is the Los Angeles Opera’s latest offering, which runs through this weekend: Bach‘s B-minor Mass, sublime in its very abstractness, and the staging (!) designed and directed by Germany’s Achim Freyer in what is listed as his American debut. (Not quite; he designed, but did not direct, the New York City Opera‘s Moses und Aron of 1990, whose ravishment also lingers in the memory.) The music, performed by just-okay German soloists with the L.A. Opera’s own orchestra and chorus, is conducted by Peter Schreier. The staging is vintage Freyer: shadows and silhouettes surrounded by scrims on which various graffiti — Leonardo here, Saul Steinberg there — come and go. The nine members of the “Achim Freyer Ensemble” move through shadows, and occasionally interlock arms and legs to create optical tricks — mostly very slow. The counterpoint between light and dark is lovely to behold; the counterpoint between what you see and what you hear is something you have to work out for yourselves. There are concurrences now and then, but not often: the “Crucifixus,” as a line of slowly slogging figures is engulfed by darkness; the “Et resurrexit,” as a stage full of supine figures rise slowly and in obvious pain against the dancing exuberance of the music.

Robert Wilson does this sort of staging too, and has had practically no recognition for it in this country — least of all in Los Angeles. Yet here is Freyer, brought over with great hoopla. I love some of his work: the Philip Glass Akhnaten that I saw in Stuttgart and his Satyagraha on video, and a thrilling Der Freischutz on video that he will re-create in San Francisco two years from now. This one doesn‘t work.

On September 11 John Adams was in London, rehearsing vocal forces for his 10-year-old opera The Death of Klinghoffer, which the BBC was preparing for its first-ever British hearing. “The news arrived in early afternoon,” Adams remembered last week, back in London for the actual performance. “I walked out into the lobby, and there was all this television about the World Trade Center catastrophe. It only took a few seconds to realize that my opera had suddenly developed some built-in problems.

“Later that afternoon I met with the cast and the chorus to talk about whether we should cancel the performance or move on. Their message, and I think it was unanimous, was that they wanted to go on, that the opposition of inflammatory messages in Alice Goodman’s libretto actually offered a special kind of solace. After all, Klinghoffer has lived on the edge of the cliff since its first performances in 1991. There were people then who hated it enough to want to kill it. Now I imagine they wish they had tried harder.”

Like the earlier Nixon in China, the first collaboration by Adams, Goodman and the high-flying stage director Peter Sellars, The Death of Klinghoffer was a venture in turning actual headlines into an operatic commodity – “CNN Opera,” as the genre soon became dubbed. Its action was the hijacking of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists in the summer of 1985 and the gratuitous murder of an American, Jewish, wheelchair-bound tourist, Leon Klinghoffer. The opera surrounds the event with a series of deeply emotional elegiac choruses in which hypothetical groups of exiles, Arab and Israeli, give personal voice to the conflicts and atrocities that divided their lands then and still do. Those thoughts are
further echoed by participants in the
drama – the confused, undermotivated Palestinians most of all. “America,” snarls one of them, “is one big Jew.”

The major sin of the opera, as detractors have been trumpeting for 10 years, now more loudly than ever, is that Adams’ music and Goodman’s words – many of them lifted straight from biblical lamentations – give the personages on both sides of a murderous conflict a genuine, lyrical personality. That wasn’t always
the plan, however. “Peter’s scenario,” Goodman recalled, “was to tell the Klinghoffer story in the first act and then turn the tone into satire. We realized early on that this wouldn’t work. In a sense, you could say that John and I hijacked the opera away from Peter.” (Beaming as usual, Sellars was in London to hear his onetime baby. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” he chortled.)

Klinghoffer‘s would-be killers at the start included most of the East Coast press. I’ll never forget the hot words during the bus ride back from the Brooklyn Academy after the premiere; another couple of blocks and there might have been a re-enactment of the murder itself. Both the San Francisco and Los Angeles operas were among the co-commissioners. The San Francisco performance in 1992 drew pickets from a Jewish information center; the Los Angeles performance never happened. By the time the Nonesuch recording came out, the opera was, by all accounts, already dead. Michael Steinberg’s liner notes for the recording contained an ironically prophetic message: “On whichever date you read these words,” he wrote concerning the tragedy of Leon Klinghoffer, “there will be a new installment in the morning paper.”

Came September 11, Steinberg’s words took on a new impact. So did the opera. In early October Mark Swed eloquently wrote, in a Calendar cover story in the Los Angeles Times, that the work had assumed an enhanced relevance that ordained a revival. A month later, however, the Boston Symphony Orchestra backed out of a performance of the inflammatory choruses – scheduled, of course, long before 9/11 – for reasons diametrically opposite to the impulse of the London singers. On December 9, The New York Times carried a verbose polemic by the firebrand/musicologist – if that isn’t a contradiction in terms – Richard Taruskin, to the effect that it would have shown “reprehensible contempt” for the victims if the Boston Symphony had fulfilled its commitment. Back and forth flashed the letters of praise and condemnation; they still do. The BBC Symphony’s concert performance at the Barbican Centre last weekend, triumphantly sung and powerfully led by Leonard Slatkin to begin a spellbinding three-day bash of Adams’ music, was London’s hottest ticket. On the same weekend the opera was also being performed in Italy, at the Communale in Ferrara, in an English-language staging slated to make it to video. There, too, protesters had gathered outside the first performance. For the moment, The Death of Klinghoffer has become the world’s most important opera.

In the years since Klinghoffer‘s early travails, Alice Goodman has abandoned her Jewish upbringing, been ordained as an Anglican minister and now preaches to a largely Palestinian congregation at a church in London’s outskirts. Adams, too, has moved explosively ahead, as London’s weekend emphatically demonstrated. Still, the apparent resuscitation of his “problem” opera has brought on memories, which he enlarged upon in a breath-catching moment during his wall-to-wall celebration. “We knew we had a difficult subject,” he recalled. “Alice immersed herself in the Koran – in English, of course – which isn’t what nice Jewish girls in Chicago naturally do. Like most American non-Jews, I had a vague idea about Jewish history. In the bookstores there was plenty to read on the subject from a Jewish point of view. Except for the writings of Edward Said, a powerful writer of Palestinian background, there was almost nothing from the other side. We read essays on the conflict, but we resolved to stay away from television and all the stereotyped interviews. What we wanted to do most of all – and this is where we had to part company from Peter’s conception – was to give those terrorist hijackers inner lives, through music and words. But that was enough to turn me into an anti-Semite in the eyes of very many people.”

In some of my very old copies of Britain’s The Gramophone there are reviews of American composers – Bernstein, Copland – that ridicule the very oxymoron. How dare these upstart colonials, wrote the august Compton MacKenzie and his confreres, aspire to the sacred realm of composition, and demand space alongside our beloved Elgar? Even within the last decade, the noted and notable film documentarian Tony Palmer (he of the nine-hour Wagner) was refused BBC support for an Adams documentary that eventually became the superb, privately funded Hail Bop! Times have, apparently, changed; the look of the crowds that pushed into the convoluted precincts of the Barbican and stood in long queues in hopes (usually dashed) of turned-back tickets for concerts, even for pre-concert lectures, was widely spread from collegian to codger. If John Adams is any proof, the American composer has in British eyes advanced from curiosity to superstar.

Adams, 54, is, of course, a special case, a product of great creative skill and exquisite timing. Tarred with the academic rectitude of a Harvard education, he seemed to know when to walk away, and when to blend the sounds of the real world into his acquired rigid Schoenbergian precepts. Academic purity was still the air of choice around 1971, but Adams had already learned to pollute it with alien accents: rock, jazz and the freedoms as preached by John Cage. The 1977 Phrygian Gates, the first music he acknowledges, is also his archetypal minimalist work: 25 minutes of richly colored throb all in one place, broken only near the end by a wrenching shift to somewhere else.

“Minimalism was, for me,” Adams reminisced, “the greatest restorative force from the structures and the abstruse language of, say, Elliott Carter and the tone-row people who were holding music in a death-embrace. It had that freshness, and it was listenable. At the same time, there was this stasis in early Philip Glass and Steve Reich. The music never went anywhere, and I wanted momentum.” That, indeed, is what begins to happen in Adams’ meteoric career: the great swoop down from a holding pattern into a gut-busting outbreak of E-flat in the Grand Pianola Music, which drew boos at its 1983 New York premiere but survives as an early career landmark; the energy explosively uncoiling in twists and turns in the 1992 Chamber Symphony; the great hootenanny that takes over at the end of Hallelujah Junction, the glorious two-piano romp that Adams fashioned in 1998 as a gift to Ernest Fleischmann.

The marvel of Adams – splendidly, exhaustively (and, I have to confess, exhaustingly) surveyed in the Beeb’s 30-hours-plus of music, film and enlightened discussion – is his astonishing gift for
combinations, for blending a broad musical vernacular into a bristling newness. It
doesn’t always work, of course. Guide to Strange Places, a brand-new 24-minute BBC commission (inspired by a travel book) that ended the weekend, came off as a somewhat drier reworking of the Chamber Symphony‘s manic convolutions. Century Rolls, the piano concerto for Emanuel Ax that was played in Los Angeles last season, does tend to roll off the edge.

The Adams outpouring honored a BBC tradition: a weekend in January given over to a single composer, with everything broadcast (most of it live). Last year’s honoree was Alfred Schnittke; Kurt Weill was celebrated the year before. Think of just that for a minute: a nation’s prime radio facility given over to an in-depth exploration of important contemporary creativity. (Could, or would, KUSC? NPR?)

The BBC Symphony is neither a superbly tuned nor an accident-proof orchestra; yet under Slatkin and, in the final concert, Adams himself, it sent some brave and forthright playing out into the acoustically tricky Barbican Hall. And, while I blush for entertaining such thoughts in a hall where Peter Sellars also sat, I found the Klinghoffer as a concert performance, with the chorus delivering its mighty and stirring invocations full-face, a more profound experience than when staged.

Mighty and stirring, to be sure; yet I don’t think I am the only one to carry away and cherish memories as well of smaller sounds during the Barbican’s Adams immersion: the wistful plangence of the clarinet concerto called Gnarly Buttons in Michael Collins’ wonderfully colored performance; the phenomenal depths in Leila Josefowicz’s playing of the Violin Concerto; the deep, lush sorrows in The Wound-Dresser, the haunting Whitman poetry sung by Christopher Maltman; pianist Rolf Hind’s staggering delivery of Phrygian Gates.

One more memory. This one is of the composer before a capacity crowd at a pre-concert talk – dealing, as I remember, with the basic question of what music is, or ought to be:

“Something beautiful,” said John Adams, “that tells the truth.”