So I've Heard

COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES: Not with a whimper but a bang, the new musical year has begun gloriously. Sunday’s crowd at Disney greeted Esa-Pekka Salonen’s onstage arrival as a Second Coming (which, in fact, it nearly was, considering his two months away). Mozart’s C-minor Wind Serenade had been scheduled to open the concert and I regretted its absence; its rhapsodic slow movement, with the horns, would have been the more fit lead-in to the elegies of Arvo Pärt’s new Fourth Symphony. The Impresario Overture, however, caught the festivities attendant on Salonen’s return.
   Imagine, Arvo Pärt seated in our hall! sharing with us the deep, plangent richness of his new work – titled “Los Angeles” after other angels than ours. Its musical textures are of angels’ wings: smooth, delicate, elegant,  the beauty that breaks hearts (in music as simple as his Fratres and in the grander, imposing structures like the John-Passion as well).
    Amazing, the texture of the work, from the deep, rich pool of sound – strings, a magical harp, the most alluring whispers from percussion —  that draws us into its depths at the start. There we stand, at the edge of something dark and beckoning. This is music of enchantment,  of entrapment, difficult to associate with the austere minimalist master. This time he has set the trap, and we are his.
      Thirty-seven years separate this new symphony from its predecessor. Number Three is the work of a young modernist  embedded in Eastern Europe’s hell-raising; Number Four is the journey’s end (or beginning) of a mature master at peace with his art. Its sounds – a string ensemble plus alien sounds profoundly invoked – are meaningful and richly beautiful. Its moderst scoring and quietude will probably not earn it wide circulation; its presence among us enriches our world. So, in fact, does all its composer’s music.
      My friends Bill and Elaine, who know the inside of my brain better than I do, and shared the derangement of that brain during the Jacaranda Concert the night before, descended upon me at intermission and begged me to leave,  to escape the onslaught that hearing the Brahms D-minor Piano Concerto so soon after the Arvo Pärt Symphony would surely wreak upon my troubled cerebellum.  I bowed to their superior counsel. I have no doubt whatever that Manny Ax played the bejeesus out of Brahms’s tortured. tortuous passages, and offer my congratulations both to those who endured his work, and those who did not.  

BIRDS, BELLS, SPELLS, AND MORTY: Jacaranda’s program looked daunting on paper,; the music  turned out even  more in actuality. Its power took flight in the unbridled fantasy of composers fixated upon infinite distances. I am not at all sure about greatness; what delighted me more was the sense of insinuation, of an abiding invitation to inundate oneself in the splashes of color and sound (the one fused to the other). From Tristan Murail, at the program’s beginning and end, there was music to tease, to jangle, to smile.  From George Benjamin came the sheer nonsense of violas wrapt around one another. Messiaen was celebrated by more of his goddam birds. The playing, too, was goddam exquisite; what a violinist, that Joel Pargman! What a colorist, that Gloria Cheng at the piano! Two singers – Elissa Johnston whom I’d heard before and Timothy Gonzales whom I’d hadn’t – made fabulous musical drama of a silly early Messiaen number. The church, Santa Monica’s First Pres, was, as usual, jammed; these are just the best programs, ever.
     The programming genius of Jacaranda was exactly the kind of unpredictable enterprise that Betty Freeman loved to encourage, and her place in the back row at the church ws tragically empty this night, a week after her death. There were so many rumors  in the first days after her death last week that everybody got some of the facts wrong, myself included. She did not die in a hospice, but at home, with a few family members. One thing that is pure Betty: Fanny Freeman, her daughter-in-law, wrote to tell me that the last music at her bedside was by Harry Birtwistle.
    The second of Morty Feldman’s two pieces titled The Viola in My Life was the first of four “American Originals” at this week’s Monday Evening Concert, and by some distance the most enchanting. Kazi Pitelka was the soloist, backed by Xtet, and I wish I had gone home after that. “American Original” seems to stand for “American Long-Windedness,” and has ever since the days of Lish McGillicuddy. Alvin Curran’s Schtyx came accompanied by the same progam note that you get with the disc, which affords you two copies of somebody’s sophomoric essay in pseudo-Joycean navel contemplation (surely not Paul Griffiths, who is otherwise accredited with the notes). Two Fred Rzewski pieces ended it: one blissfully brief, the other – though encouragingly titled “Pocket Symphony” – somewhat overstuffed.

YO-YO: The fortnight that ends for him with the Inaugural and the SuperBowl began somewhat more modestly with Osvaldo Golijov’s Azul in its West Coast premiere. (Yo-Yo Ma had already performed the work at Tanglewood.) Slice it as you will, the work is more of the same old Golijov, and that should be enough for anyone. It celebrates its composer’s multi-nationality: the Argentina here, the middle-Eastern there, the marvelous sense that blends colors, creates slashes of sound, and lets even the most hearing-deficient of us know that Golijov is a master at synthesizing musical styles, and that the cello – in the hands of a master of the bow – is exactly the instrument to do these talents justice.
   That said, Azul (the title means “Blue”) reveals no new vistas. It is good, solid, Yo-Yo Ma stuff; it calls upon a couple of extra instruments – hyper-accordion, stretched-out drums – a kind of portable Silk Road – to fill in those exotic sounds. Considering ticket prices at Royce Hall  last Sunday, and the size of the crowds pushing their way in, it wouldn’t be polite to suggest that both Yo-Yo and Golijov could probably toss this stuff off in their sleep, but honestly…”
     Never mind. When it came to the Beethoven Seventh Symphony, which ended the program, Mark Swed is full of old shoes. That was a truly great performance under Jeff Kahane, with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra bright and brassy and Allan Vogel’s oboe keen and urgent and one of the best orchestral noises in the land.

BETTY: She insisted on facing death alone: no tests, no chemo, no drawn-out bedside ceremonies. Friends had lunched with her on Christmas, and made plans for future get-togethers, and then Betty Freeman retired to a hospice somewhere and died, on Saturday, of pancreatic cancer, at 86, with just a few family members attending.
Never mind that she’d become a pretty difficult old grouch in her last days. She supported a lot of music, a lot of music-making (plus art and other activities). Her choices for whom and what to support became more and more capricious at times. She worshipped complexity and abstruseness, and this led her to adore composers like  HelmutLachenmann and Harry Birtwistle and to fail to grasp the simple surfaces over the profundities in the music of, say, Lou Harrison. Once, at a chamber-music concert at LACMA,  when I had been ravished by a Beethoven slow movement and Betty had informed me that that was “the dullest music I had ever heard” I really lost it and delivered something of a tongue-lashing. We didn’t speak for days afterwards.
One day back in 1982, Betty asked me to help her round up composers, familiar and not-so, to come to her house, talk about their music to an invited audience, have some performances and end with a little food and drink which her husband Franco Assetto, the Italian sculptor and inventor of exotic pasta sauces, would supply. The Salotti – as Franco dubbed these “grand salons” – soon became the Los Angeles Sunday afternoon hot ticket. Our star performers included Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Philip Glass, John Adams…and a lot of young composers as well, at the start of their careers. Betty roamed through the room with her camera; her son Robbie ran the tape recorder. Franco, who had little taste for new music and gran gusto for his pasta sauces, would storm into the room at a certain point to demand an end to the music and a start to the “real”festivities.
But the Salotto proved its real value from the start. One composer I particularly wanted to introduce was Robert Erickson, whose music I had admired from our days together at KPFA. Betty hadn’t heard of Bob, but I brought him up from UC San Diego1, with a few musicians. After the program she agreed to underwrite an entire disc of his music.
That was Betty in her great years. She wrote checks those days, to cover the rent, to pay for new compositions, for whatever life demanded, for some of America’s major innovators: for John Cage and his dancing partner Merce Cunningham, for Lou Harrison, for wherever and whomever the need arose. In earlier years she had studied photography with the great Ansel Adams. Later on she worked on that art,  traveling widely to photograph major composers and performers, setting up exhibitions of her portrait photography, enhancing the impact of the art she serves so well though one further dimension.
Through all the exasperation, Betty was easy to love. I loved the unpredictability; you couldn’t sell her on the late Beethoven Quartets, but when the L.A. Opera came to town with Handel’s Julius Caesar she demanded to attend to all five performances. She let be known her hatred of Esa-Pekka’s new Piano Concerto, yet welcomed Yefim Bronfman to practice the work on her piano, day after day. I doubt if she knew, or cared about, the difrerence.

DIGRESSION: Finally, after an unreasonably long delay, Easy Living has turned up on DVD, buried in a massive Universal Studios “cinema classics” re-release series but shining brightly. Truly dedicated  movie buffs and professors of film history hold this film in special regard; it is one of a small company of accidentally perfect masterpieces. It is priced at a paltry $14.85.
  Preston Sturges wrote the script, some years before he would advance to the stature of writer/director; Mitchell Leisen, one of Hollywood’s smarter studio hacks, picked up on the genius quotient in Sturges’ words, the timing, the great ensemble buildups, the ear. Yes the ear; every one of the great Sturges comedies draws its maximum strength from its magnificent orchestration of the voice of its central character,  drawn out to its maximum power of persuasion (Stanwyck in The Lady Eve), frustration (Bracken in Hail the Conquering Hero) and on and on.
     Easy Living thrives on the sound of Jean Arthur, a sound you can come close to with a piece of tissue paper over a comb. It sings duets with the bass tuba of Edward Arnold. The structural genius of the Sturges script – every Sturges script, in fact – is the slow, steady buildup in the action toward utter chaos. Jean Arthur and Ray Milland meet in the Automat; she’s broke, but he monkeys with the machinery to provide her with food. Management wises up; all the doors on the Automat cubicles spring open. A bum at the doorway gives the signal: “FREE FOOD!!”; chaos absolute ensues.almost unbearably hilarious..
      The film hangs on two of these great energy accumulations. (The second involves the New York Stock Exchange and a couple of English sheepdogs.) Mozart knew how to build his ensembles this way. I have no idea whether Sturges had Figaro or Così in mind, although he did have a pretty good cultural upbringing. But after a joyous reunion with this great comedy – and frequent revisits to his  The Lady Eve, which is chock full of Cosi fan Tutte — the Mozart connection has been fun to speculate upon. Maybe it’s just because there’s been so little else to dine upon on the musical platter  these holiday weeks.

  More music: At the end of Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir the  brilliantly conceived animation fades into horrifying realism, news footage of the faces and screams of the newly bereaved, wrapped in the saddest music I know, the slow movement of Schubert’s A-major Sonata, music of his year of death. At the opposite end of the filmmaker’s great arrt, it is also close to unbearable.

FUTURE SHAPES: Imagine the scene,  in a rehearsal room in a building many miles oceanward from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The stage is a sloping expanse, perhaps 40 feet across, painted white with geometrical patterns. At the front sits Hagen, leader of the Gibichungs; he is masked and costumed to resemble, perhaps, a very large dog, and he is for the most part immobile. Dancers move about the stage, sixteen or so, mostly in black head-to-toe. They carry long rods; they might be fluorescent lights, but I think they stand in for spears. Fronting the stage there is a long table with control equipment: microphones, laptops, cameras, many people calling out staging instructions, one elderly, bearded, smiling man whose manner informs you that he knows more than anyone else about what is going on, because it is his conception.
That is Achim Freyer. In three months the Los Angeles Opera will begin performances of his production of Wagner’s Ring der Nibelung, the first time he has undertaken this monumental chunk of Teutonic chutzpah without which no opera company seems able these days to lay claim to fulfillment. Everything I’ve seen of Freyer’s art — the daring productions of Bach and Berlioz he has done here, an endearing Der Freischütz as folk art available on DVD, a trilogy of Philip Glass operas better that those works deserved –  suggest that he was sent to this planet to create The Ring. How have we deserved the great good fortune that he is doing his first-ever Ring here,, for us? That great good fortune resides in the person of the late Edgar Baitzel, the guiding spirit of the L.A. Opera who stood behind virtually any outstanding project that this company has achieved in recent years that establishes its uniqueness, its bravery. It was Christine Baitzel, by the way, who invited me to witness this rehearsal yesterday, a small episode in the formation of the vast project that – not yet even brick by brick but small clod by clod gradually becoming brick – is now taking shape.
I mentioned the character named Hagen, so you know that this wasn’t even a rehearsal of the first two dramas of The Ring – which are up for performance this coming March and April – but of Die Götterdämmerung, the final work in the cycle, which isn’t due on the boards here until April, 2010. Sure enough, the music resounding through the loudspeakers is from a beloved old recording: Karl Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic, with Joseph Greindl’s thrilling, hard-edged villainy as Hagen. Freyer came over to greet me; my remembered three words of German from the  Vienna Konservatorium came in handy. He’s anxious for me to realize that none of what I’m seeing – the dancers with their light-sabers, the canine Hagen – has anything to with the final look of the stage at the Dorothy Chandler. They are all to establish proportion. From here the actions will be videotaped, and that video can serve like an artist’s sketchpad.
That is why, even with stand-in performers, Freyer and his staff of interpreters work meticulously to shape the actions. I watched with fascination as a young dancer in the role of the deceived Brünnhilde, dragged onto the stage by Hagen’s men after her forced marriage, must take an agonized fall, and how important it was that this one small action must needs – in Freyer’s over-all plan – be meticulously shaped,  exactly matched to a grander plan. Two hours of this, and the slow-turning wheels of opera-making become a truly impressive force.
I cornered Freyer for a minute or two; I had just acquired the box of  DVDs that Naxos has brought out, seven operatic productions filmed in the 1950s by the great and controversial Walter Felsenstein, which I’ll get around to writing about one of these weeks. I suspected that Freyer and Felsenstein might represent opposite attitudes toward operatic production, and I think I was right. “We are at opposite ends,” he tells me. “With Felsenstein it is all spectacle, wonderful spectacle to be sure. That ‘Schlaue Fuchslein’ of his – ‘Cunning Little Vixen’ – there is nothing like it. But my opera is all about character, personality. Under my book by Wagner there is always a book by Brecht, and this is my guiding force.”
GRANDMA BESSIE’S BOY: There’s contrast for you, life among the Gibichung family on Wednesday, the Thomaschefskys on Saturday. Every musician’s pen is guided by ancestral genes, Irving Berlin and Gershwin, George M. Cohan’s Yankee Doodle, Cab Calloway. MTT has turned his ancestral Thomaschefskys, who implanted the seeds of theatrical Yiddishkeit into Broadway soil and nurtured the growth of American musical theate, into a wonderful evening’s entertainment – maybe the purest and worthiest of his attainments ever. Four singer-actors carried the entertainment forward, and did so with a purity of manner and freedom from shtik as to make all other period-style imitators – eat yer heart out, Bernadette Peters — cheap and cornball. The show at Disney was long, and sagged now and then, but the pride and affection was genuine. It left me – and the 2,200 others in Disney that night, I’m willing to bet – with vivid memories of my own grandparents, not showbiz folk but with records up in the attic that I suddenly realize I can remember most vividly. Don’t get me started.

ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER: The crowd for the Calder Quartet program at Zipper last Friday overpowered the box-office staff, which was unfortunate and should be looked into; otherwise it was an encouraging and blessed event. A lot of it was student freebie, of course, but even the asking price for the paying crowd  – ten bucks – was just right. The crowd was attentive and appreciative; there was a small ripple of applause, quickly shushed, after the first movement of the Mozart Quartet, but none thereafter. I hate to sound stuffy about applauding between movements, or about observance of repeats in classical sonata-form movements (which the Calders don’t do, alas), but these are details that really do enhance great musical designs. The Calders are a splendid ensemble, and their enlightened attitude at the box-office can restore a great chamber-music culture to this city. It might as well be founded on respect for the product. (I understand that the same program played in Orange County for something like $65 a ticket. That’s their problem.)
It was a superb program. The “dissonance” that gives Mozart’s C-major Quartet its name hung menacingly in Zipper’s acoustic excellence; the slow movement was elegance enow. Thomas Adès Piano Quintet engaged the wonderful wit of its composer, and of Gloria Cheng, who obviously holds it dear. Bartók’s Fifth Quartet, not often enough heard around here since the demise of the Sequoia Quartet of fond memory, zoomed ahead with fine energy, and told its final joke most humorously.

That was Friday. On Saturday there was Jacaranda, still up to its ears in celebrating Olivier Messiaen’s 100th birthday – four days short.  The crowd was small; Mark Robson had, after all, performed the Vingt Régards at a Piano Spheres concert not that long ago,  and that can be measured as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
I am still not sure where to go from there. There is a way of experiencing this music that transcends familiar pathways; you give yourself to its language with a realization that it cannot lend itself to normal methods of parsing.  It angered me for a time, to be screamed at in an absolutely foreign language. Certain works of Messiaen I still find unbearable; their colors are so bright that they actually hurt my eyes, and I’m looking forward to next week’s cataract surgery for an enhanced acceptance of, say, the “Quartet for the End of Time.”
The piano works project the right colors; Mark Robson sat there, in Santa Monica’s  First Pres, for 2-1/2 hours, pulling down clouds of the deepest purple streaked with bright orange, and that was all pretty wonderful. Happy Birthday, Cher Olivier, and Elliott Carter, too.

Sunday: still in church. The four wonderful women of Anonymous4 disbanded a few years ago, but come together now and then, their precious sense of medieval harmonic authenticity intact and enhanced by their explorations into later authenticities – old-timey American hymnology, for one. Saint James Episcopal Church in downtown L.A. was their “Historic Site”this time, sold out to the rafters, naturally. Their program: English carols as far back as the 14th and 15th centuries, Americana from the 18th and 19th.
It’s no easier to describe what comes across from the singing of this marvelous group than it is anything else in the preceding paragraphs: the harmonies of Messiaen’s visions of the infant Christ, the  radiant little insipid tune that steals into the last measures of Bartók. All this is part of the force that sustains me as I sit here at an absurdly advanced age and try to write about music. If you don’t know the singing of Anonymous4 there are their discs, and I envy you your discovery. There is nothing quite like it.
Start with the disc called “Gloryland.”

The Monday Evening Concerts push on toward 70 years; all praise to Justin Urcis for maintaining a level of imaginative, creative programming that, in one way or another, crowned the efforts that got the concerts off the ground and onto Peter Yates’ roof in 1939. This week’s program revived an element that came into the MEC’s programming during the time of Stravinsky/Robert Craft influence, a cultivation of interest in the avant-garde dabblings of times other than the very latest. Specifically, Monday’s concert was built around a clutch of 14th-century music by Johannes Ciconia, Guillaume de Machaut and other names less familiar. “Ars Nova” – the New Art – was the watchword; harmonies, rhythms and melodic shapes went through some interesting, manneristic permutations.
Monday’s performers, soprano Phoebe Jevtovic Alexander and a couple of string players, didn’t quite seem at home in the 14th century; too  bad the Anonymous weren’t around to show them something about the life force. The program had begun with plenty of  force, but also not much life: something called “Sugar 1” by Michael Maierhof. This called for three of our finest locals –  cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, violinist Eric km-Clark and pianist/percussionist Amy Knoles – brutalizing their instruments over a time-span of 15 minutes of which the last 14 made no sense. Later on there was an attractive set by the accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti, ending with the lyric elegance of Luciano Berio’s Sequenza for solo accordion in its Los Angeles premiere, by some distance the evening’s most gratifying music.
Was a ten-minute  work, at evening’s end, adequate salvation for the entire program? Since the composer in question was Luciano Berio, and the work worthy of his pen, the question answers itself.  While we’re on the subject, however,  there is a matter of programming deficiency that I think demands consideration, if the Monday Evening Concerts – rescued as they have been from their near-fatal dismissal by LACMA,  their ill-advised previous sponsors – resume their former importance. It’s the matter of representation of music by local, or West-Coast, or current California composers – not the bygones or the classic guys on the next program, but the composers who are doing things here, now.  Peter Yates used to be good about that, and so did his successors.

Tuesday was Green Umbrella night and, for I think the second time in maybe 20 years, I was in bed by 8:30. These things happen.
Besides, I needed  to be fresh and wide-awake for Vicki. Not that I am in any position to speak with authority on the amazingly enriched art of Vicki Ray and the combinative accomplishments; it just gets to me. What gets to me is the interweave: the insidious inducements of the body-weave and the piano-tone as pitch and rhythm blend  into the “body of your dreams-in-the-sky” or, from years before, the ghostly collage with Shaun Naidoo, the “Best Times Coming” number that knocked me out of my seat years ago at a “PianoSpheres” concert  and dragged me into an awareness of an oncoming century and what its technology might portend. Something about Vicki, her smile, all that hair, and her all-embracing humor that  makes me trust her as she guides me through the technology of where we are today. I sure don’t know most of what happened at that concert of hers on Wednesday night, but I wouldn’t have missed it, even if I had to sleep through the “Green Umbrella” the night before.

RANDOM THOUGHTS AT WEEK’S END: DON ROSENBERG, DOWNGRADED AT THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER FOR HIS CONTINUED NEGATIVSM TOWARD THAT CITY’S ORCHESTRA AND ITS CONDUCTOR, HAS NOW FILED SUIT AGAINST THE PAPER PLUS THE ORCHESTRA’S MANAGEMENT, THEREBY PULLING DOWN WIDESPREAD HUZZAHS FROM THE BELEAGUERED CRITICAL BROTHERHOOD. YES, IT’S BAD NEWS WHEN A PUBLICATION ATTEMPTS TO MANAGE THE CRITICAL VIEWPOINT OF AN EMPLOYED WRITER. (SHALL I TELL YOU SOMEDAY ABOUT THE DAY TIME REWROTE ONE OF MY REVIEWS, TOP TO BOTTOM?) IT’S ALSO BAD NEWS WHEN A CRITIC BECOMES SO BLINKERED INTO AN ATTITUDE THAT HIS ESTIMATIONS BECOME VALUELESS. (SHALL I DIG OUT MY OLD STUFF VS. ENRIQUE JORDÁ IN SAN FRANCISCO? OR BERNHEIMER’S STUFF VS. NEARLY EVERYTHING HERE IN L.A.?) IT WAS SHEER STUPIDITY FOR THE PLAIN DEALER TO KEEP ROSENBERG ON STAFF BUT BAN HIM FROM THE CITY’S ONE WORTHWHILE CULTURAL AMENITY AND – WORSE YET, TO TURN THAT ONE AMENITY OVER TO AN UNWASHED CUB REPORTER. THAT’S THE PAPER TELLING THE WORLD THAT IT DOESN’T KNOW SHIT FROM SHINOLA ABOUT THE CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA AND THAT IS WORTH THE ENTIRE POPULATION OF CLEVELAND BRINGING SUIT AGAINST THE PAPER.
ANYHOW, I THINK CLEVELAND DESERVES A BETTER CONDUCTOR AND A BETTER CRITIC, BUT CLEVELAND BEING CLEVELAND, NEITHER JOB WILL BE EASY TO FILL.
MEANWHILE, WE HAVE BEEN VISITED BY BALTIMORE’S PRIDE,  MARIN ALSOP, THE SNAPPY BLONDE PRODUCT OF THE P-R MACHINE WHO AMASSES BROWNIE POINTS BY PROGRAMMING EASY-TO-LOVE CONTEMPORARY MUSIC AT HER CABRILLO FESTIVAL (CHRISTOPHER ROUSE CONCERTOS FOR ORCHESTRA!! UP THE BAZOOTY!!) AND BECOMES FAMOUS FOR BECOMING FAMOUS FOR DIGGING OUT LENNY’S PATHETIC MASS, AND PERFORMING BRAHMS IN INEXPENSIVE NAXOS ALBUMS SUCH THAT MAKE HER A BRAHMS AUTHORITY JUST FOR THE DOING. EVEN IF I ADMIRED THE AFOREMENTIONED BRAHMS’S FIRST SYMPHONY I WOULD HAVE FOUND SATURDAY NIGHT’S PERFORMANCE ROUGH, COLD AND UNLOVELY. PART MAY HAVE COME FROM RESEATING THE ORCHESTRA – CELLOS DOWN FRONT, AS IN THE OLD DAYS, SO THAT MASSED VIOLINS ON THE LEFT WERE SHRILL AND GROSS. PART MAY HAVE COME FROM A GENERALLY POOR SENSE OF BALANCE. NIKOLAJ ZNAIDER DELIVERED A KNOCKOUT BRAHMS VIOLIN CONCERTO, HOWEVER. HE HAD EVEN MADE ME LIKE THE SIBELIUS, AT THE BOWL A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO. SOME VIOLINIST!

GUSTAVO’S WEEK: On Thursday night there was the Strauss Alpen-Symphonie, an hour of orchestral banality as unbearable to the mind and the backside as anything I care to summon up. The work must appeal to Dudamel, for reasons I will not attempt to fathom. On this program it followed the Concerto (K. 488) that offers Mozart’s exquisite   A-major scoring for winds and horns, and the piano solo in the slow movement that could just break your heart  (but not as rattled out by Rudolf Buchbinder this time around; what has happened to his fine old sensitivity?).

Saturday morning Gustavo met with the first of the youth orchestras that will take shape city-wide, inspired by Venezuela’s El Sistema, the educational system that has given us our Maestro, along  with an annual quarter-million kids who play in orchestras throughout their country. Saturday’s gathering was the EXPO Center Youth Orchestra, the first project of Youth Orchestra LA (YOLA), a partnership of the Philharmonic, the Department of Recreation and Parks, and the Harmony Project that, among other good deeds, provides deserving kids with the instruments they need. EXPO Center, where we met, is the converted 1932 Olympic Swim Stadium. EXPO Center Youth Orchestra’s kids come mainly from within a 5-mile radius of the Center, representing more than 60 public, charter and private schools in South LA. The “System” includes workshops for parents, involving them in the childrens’ musical activities. Instruments are provided free, so long as their “owners” take proper care.

I walked in. An orchestra of 100-or-so were struggling with something vaguely recognizable as the last movement of the Beethoven Fifth, a truncated version and with Beethoven’s orchestration enhanced with xylophone, bass drum, seven or eight trumpets…get the idea?. The kids looked anywhere from six to, maybe 14, and the great sight – one of them, anyhow – was that when Dudamel walked through the ranks to deal one-on-one with, say, an errant trumpet section, it was as another of the group: same height, same boyish smile.

He pleaded with those brass players; they’d been letting the tone droop a the end of a phrase.”I wanted to be a trombone player, but I couldn’t. My arm was too short; I couldn’t manage the…what you call it…the slide.” A little later, struggling with the strings, he has all the players set their instruments down and sing a few minutes of Beethoven’s score. “You see, how beautiful? Now let’s play like that. …”

A half hour after my arrival, the EXPO Center Youth Orchestrs had begun to deliver a recognizable version of somebody-or-other’s rewrite of that Beethoven movement. On his podium, Dudamel looks pleased. “In two years,” he promised, “we’re going to play at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. And it won’t be just this cut-down edition of the Beethoven Fifth Symphony; it’ll be the real thing. “ Somehow, a real thing had already begun to take shape that morning.

JOHN ADAMS: Is there still  anything about John Adams – the composer, that is, family name Adamson, Swedish – that still needs writing down? The critics have surely had their say: Mark Swed here in town, Alex Ross in the eloquent epigram to his important book, myself in (sob!) the Weekly, Thomas May  in his John Adams Reader that wisely collects us and many more. We have lacked only a few words from the object of our affectation himself, and if you know John Adams’s music –  really know it – it may not surprise you to discover that everything up to now is puny indeed beside the guy, and what he has to say about himself.

You want to know what it takes to compose great music, serious music that can reach out and touch people importantly? Read John Adams — in this wonderful new memoir called Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26) – in the pages on his activities in the time of 9/11. Conscience stirs him; as it happens, he is in London at the time, preparing a recording of his Death of Klinghoffer, the opera that pits choruses of Jews and terrorists against one another in equal force. The New York Philharmonic wants a piece from him on the tragedy. He is repulsed by the idea, by the media’s almost immediate “kitschification” of the attack. He is moved, finally, by New York itself, by the hand-lettered signs posted around Ground Zero, by the racketing of streets even at 3 a.m., by the “fractals of information” that he can interweave with a text of victims’ names, quietly spoken by a chorus of children. Most of the performing organizations made the automatic move on 9/11, plugging in the great Requiems of Mozart and Brahms. Completed months later,  the intensely human, quiet urgency of Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls came far closer to the sense of that day. It also earned Adams his first Pulitzer.

“And then I wrote…” Composer-memoirs, no less than prose authors’ memoirs, come a dime-a-dozen. Something about this intense, immensely charming and revealing work of Adams, however, transcends the bunch. The tell-all is positively disarming; show me another composer willing to admit that one of his best orchestral works, the Chamber Symphony is a blend of influences from the same-named music by atonality pioneer Arnold Schoenberg and the cartoon comic Ren and Stimpy favored by his son Sam. (Show me another composer, for that matter, willing to name his first-born after a beer.)

As memoirs go, Hallelujah Junction follows a circuitous path – like the eponymous dirt road in the High Sierras, where Adams’ maintains his composing retreat.  It starts with a dance-band on a New Hampshire pleasure boat, with Dad on clarinet and young John listening, learning, moving on to music jobs in summer camps, eventually to Harvard. There his life is bracketed by The Beatles, LSD and Pierre Boulez. He learns the rules of strict counterpoint,  discovers John Coltrane  and submits his first composition: The Electric Wake. On graduation his mother presents him with a copy of John Cage’s Silence, a  libertarian manifesto; his response is to climb into his car and head West. Cruising along California hilltops at sunrise, Wagner on the stereo, he has his first epiphany; he begins to know what music is all about. Later, looking down at the Pacific, he will turn a second epiphany (The Dharma at Big Sur) into music to help dedicate Disney Hall.

The first San Francisco years run on familiar tracks: beans and ramen in the Haight-Ashbury, one marriage torpedoed, one small break leading to a bigger one, a brave new conductor at the Symphony (Edo de Waart) willing to take a chance and – kaboom! – Harmonium, a first masterpiece and a big one. The second was the super-gorgeous Grand Pianola, and I was privileged to be in the Lincoln Center audience that erupted in almost-unanimous booing, and to chronicle the event in Newsweek as West Coast music achieving landfall.

Adams achieved security: composer-in-residence at the SF Symphony. He had not composed a note for the human voice when, in 1982,  boy-genius Peter Sellars descends upon him with plans fully drawn for an opera called  Nixon in China, but somehow he draws blood. Everything you wanted to know about Nixon is set forth in Adams’ brilliant character-analysis of the Sellars’ and Alice Goodman’s scenario and libretto.

Came next, however, Klinghoffer, with its good-Jew/bad-Jew censorship controversy that won’t go away so long as producers assume the chutzpah of producing the opera in any form. (The original Sellars staging has been superseded by the interesting Penny Woolcock revision on DVD, which does not, fortunately,  pull the teeth of the drama. ) Adams fairly details the many attempts to kill the work, most of all the jeremiad by musicologist Richard Taruskin that ran in the New York Times, which is answered with equal sting by librettist Goodman (who converted out of Judaism while creating Klinghoffer’s poetry).

Doctor Atomic differs in that Adams approached Peter Sellars with the idea, rather than vice versa; the piling-up of controversy, the intensity of positive and negative criticism, remain the same. (Balancing, however, is the sublime A Flowering Tree, composed almost simultaneously, impossible to disparage.) The piece, first of all, rests on a fabulous mingling of poetry: John Donne, the Bhagavad Gita, Muriel Rukeyser, blended into Sellars’s gathering of scientific memoranda, data rescued from trashcans, etc. Again, any doubts about the sureness of Adams’s part in this music are easily dispelled in his own words on the opera’s focal moment. J. Robert Oppenheimer stands alone, his soul lacerated by the words of John Donne, the shadow of The Bomb behind…as John Adams, in the key of D minor, lacerates us all. You don’t need to read music to know how this works; John is there to make it clear.

THE WEEK THAT WILL BE: So here’s December, when the music lightens up for the holidays, and we get to turn off the brains for a few weeks of jingle-bells, Hah! December 4: Gustavo Dudamel leads the Philharmonic at Disney in Kurtág’s Stele, Mozart’s A-major Piano Concerto (with the heartbreaking slow movement, and with Rudolf Buchbinder, who hasn’t been here in years) and with, oh well, Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. December 5 at Zipper, Gloria Cheng and the Calder Quartet play Tom Adès’ Piano Quintet, among other treasures. Saturday night I must forsake the LA Weekly’s 30th Anniversary Party because Mark Robson is playing all of Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt Regards at Jacaranda at Santa Monica’s First Pres. Sunday, the sublime Anonymous 4 sings as nobody else can, at a Historic Site downtown.  The Monday Evening Concerts resume at Zipper on guess when, with an imaginatively-planned “avant-garde” program of music daring in its time, “its time” ranging from the Middle Ages to approximately yesterday. Tuesday, there’s the Green Umbrella at Disney: Cage, Stockhausen and Ligeti. Too tired for Brahms the following Friday? Don’t blame you!

I seem  to have forgotten to write about the L.A. Opera’s Carmen, Understandable. I don’t think this is a bad opera; some of Bizet’s music greatly illuminates the characters onstage, and I think he hit exactly the right tone for the drab ordinariness of his Micaëla. It needs to be performed as written, however, with spoken recitative — rather than the hackwork recitatives supplied by others after Bizet’s death – that sets the big musical number in greater relief. But nobody at the Chandler Pavilion – not  the conductor, not the ladies and gentlemen of the first of the two casts – performed with any inkling of how to make this opera glisten with sex appeal; it’s all “ho-hum another night of ‘Carmen.’ Why couldn’t someone have watched Denyse Graves at the Bowl, gee whiz? I’d like to know which misguided optimist in the company decided to schedule this for ten performances rather than the usual seven. On opening night most of the seats were filled at the start; by the last act you could have played basketball in the wide open spaces. There hasn’t been a good new recording or DVD of  Carmen in years. My favorites, both with a young and lively Plácido Domingo, are the 1984 Francesco Rosi movie, with the lithe, insinuating Julia Migenes-Johnson – which does have spoken recits – and the even-older Franco Zeffirelli staging from Vienna on TDK, conducted with great thrust by Carlos Kleiber, with a Carmen, Elena Obraztsova, who might be Mom to all the other aforementioned Carmens here, but who has learned to put those years to good use.

Someday, of course, the inevitable and magnificent idea will descend upon some operatic impresario, that the salvation for Carmen: the totality of the spirit of this potentially great opera for our time and for the years to come, resides in our own Gustavo Dudamel. Not that his music-making among us this past week had anything to do with this particular score. It had, instead, to do with the worn-out journeyman Philharmonickers from Israel, never a first-rate band but especially road-weary at the end of their cross-country tour, saddled with a tsimmis of a hackwork by Leonard Bernstein that employed everything short of vacuum cleaners to celebrate 50 years of second-rate orchestral performance. Four days later, same podium same hall, different orchestra and, you’d swear, different conductor – this was, I swear, the most eloquent, moving, poetically motivated Beethoven “Pastoral” Symphony you could imagine or even dream about. If you weren’t there you just can’t imagine the beauty in the orchestral balance this young genius fashioned, between winds and strings, between low winds and high winds. My, oh my it was beautiful. Just think…this is our Gustavo!!!

STILL AT IT: Some of you may wonder whatever happened to Martin Bernheimer or, in general, to the brand of ho-hum, above-it-all discourse he used to dispense, in the guise of music criticism, here at the L.A. Times. Rest assured, Martin is apparently alive and well, and so is his venomous pen. He is currently perched in New York, whence he dispatches his observations on that city’s musical life to the Financial Times of London. Certain key words in his vocabulary – “artsy” above all — sustain his chosen position, high on some imagined peak, looking down. Here is his utter failure to comprehend Peter Sellars ’s brilliant evaluation of Kurtág’s “Kafka Fragments,” – first done in New York before the “Green Umbrella” performance at Disney – and his covering of that failure with his signature snide negativism.

“Apparently distrusting both text and score, Sellars illustrated Kafka’s abstractions with mundane domestic rituals accompanied by artsy black-and-white  projections (photography by David Michalek). Dawn Upshaw and Geoff Nutall enacted the bad-boy director’s simplistic manoeuvres with conscientious bravado. They performed brilliantly, bravely, tirelessly. The barefoot soprano, dressed in a floppy flannel shirt and slacks, did a lot of miming and mugging, also ironing, scrubbing, stretching and crouching. The barefoot fiddler, similarly attired, provided earnest shadow-play. Still, the result was distracting at best, pretentious at worst. Sellars managed to reduce Kurtág’s fierce poetry to silly prose.”

To me, and to the admirably large audience that showed up in Disney Hall for this spellbinding event, caught the spirit, remained remarkably silent as if participating, this was an affirmation of the genius of Sellars, something I have not always been moved to acknowledge.  It affirmed his unique power, to see deeply into convoluted music and to find its visual counterpart, the core that enables it to reach an audience. Dawn Upshaw’s voice has become almost a part of Peter’s art,  a miraculous counterweight: a sound not entirely pure, maintaining a “human” edge that he and we can hold onto. I listen with delight and awe to a tape of my own personal ”discovery” of Upshaw, a Schubert recital at Symphony Space in 1986, the sound of angels, and trace her growth, the gradual deepening. (And wasn’t that close to the year that the charming, shy Kurtág showed up at Ojai, his first-ever American experience?) The “Fragments” are small points of daily life and, above all, of daily pain, mirrored in the mundane activities on stage, most of all in the rural rag-tag costumes, even made to fit somehow in the citified splendor of Disney. The visual aspects of the performance, the activities on screen and the domestic activities of Mom Dawn down front, I found neither distracting nor pretentious; simply and honestly, they underlined the ordinariness of everything else on that stage and bound them all together, unforgettably.

IN DUTCH: There was to be a three-concert Festival of new music from The Netherlands at REDCAT last weekend. Unfortunately some of the performers were imprisoned at CalArts by smoke that shut down I-5; their concerts will, I presume, be rescheduled. I did hear the final concert, by the E.A.R. Unit, from which I departed in somewhat bedazzled state. Part of that came from attempting to focus on one of the six composers, a certain Richard Ayres, cricket star, who (his bio tells us without cracking a smile) ran away from home, became a cabin boy on a freighter transporting china-clay, whose crew read “Finnegans Wake,” performed John Cage — and who is now selecting music for a manned journey to Mars. That was about the charm level of the concert: i.e.: high. Louis Andriessen, everybody’s favorite Hollander, contributed music for violin and piano in unison, creating the ringing overtones of the resultant “hyper instrument.” Yannis Kyriakides’ “mnemonist 5” sent the mind a-twirl with projected dancing syllabic permutations NA MA VA SA. The E.A.R. Unit, now 27 years old, has something like 500 world premieres under its collective belts. Of its five members, Amy, Vicki and Erica go all the way back. Where would we be without them?

EVEN SMALL: Esa-Pekka Salonen calls his new string quartet, his first, “Homunculus,” the small piece that contains all the elements of a large piece. “I was really trying to put my best music into the piece” he told the OC Register’s  Tim Mangan in a great interview worth the search, and he succeeded. The work missed its OC appearance; a death in the family of a Johannes Quartet member forced a cancellation. A heroic substitute violist, Lesley Robertson of the St. Lawrence Quartet, crammed the part in time for last night’s performance at Royce Hall, where the Johannes shared the program with the Guarneri Quartet in its farewell appearance. Blessings upon her. More on the Guarneri another time. Salonen’s Quartet lasts a tight fifteen minutes. The writing for strings is, for the most part, dense; at the start there is a dark, sweeping outburst of melody. On one hearing I heard this as the most Sibelian of any of his works; I mean this not pejorative, only in the sense of prevailing dark texture. Small, explosive. Incidentally, in the interview Salonen let the cat out of the bag as to his next project listed as TBA, April 9, 2009. A violin concerto, to be danced.

REFRESHMENT: Hearing Carl Vine’s Piano Sonata once again was a stimulating and refreshing experience. I don’t understand why this marvelous work hasn’t assumed a prominent place in the repertory. Its language is sure and strong; if Elliott Carter is prominent among its forbears, as Vine has said, that is the aspect of Carter’s music I most admire: the driving force, the clarity, the gift of expressing so much with such admirable economy. Yes, Carter’s own Sonata, an early work, does accomplish much the same. I heard the Vine sonata first in 1993, when an unknown young Australian named Michael Kieran Harvey pleased and astonished us all and made off with a piano competition, run at Ambassador Auditorium by that brilliant if semi-crackpot pianistic genius Ivo Pogorelich (of “whatever happened to…?” fame). Harvey never went on to an internatiional career; the most operable explanation is that he didn’t want to play all the Chopin and Rachmaninoff that the big-time managers would have wanted. According to Liam Viney, who began his Piano Spheres program the other night with the Vine Sonata – brilliantly – Harvey does have a successful career in Australia. Just check out his website; his list of concert dates and recordings goes on for days! And according to Jim Svejda, who runs something of a one-man Carl Vine fan club on KUSC, Mr. Vine continues to write great music.
Now, to Liam Viney’s “Piano Spheres” concert of Australian music, at Zipper on Tuesday. He is 30, Australian, and has been on the piano faculty at CalArts for the past three years. Inevitably, a program that starts with the Vine Sonata is doomed to slump somewhat downhill thereafter, but there were bright spots. Matthew Hindson’s “Plastic Jubilation” came with a built-in program, something about revenge against some act of music criticism; this was executed with the aid of a click track and some raucous razzberries from a loudspeaker and was okay, I guess, of its kind. There were some small indigenous pieces by Peter Sculthorpe, the sort one expects as a nation’s composer approaches Grand Old Man status, and quite a strong one-movement Sonata by Nigel Westlake, who sounds worth investigating. So, by the way, is Mr. Viney, a terrific young pianist. There was no Times review of this, an important event.
SALVATION THROUGH K. 448There was one of next night’s concert, however, a glamorous, celebrity event of less musical importance. The repertory for two pianos has some attractive works –  Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Bartók (with percussion), Debussy – but nothing to compare in richness and depth with the small-but-select  repertory for four hands at one piano. One work for two pianos by Mozart is the sole exception, and psychiatrists have studied the slow movement of that D-major Sonata (K. 448) as a paradigm of a work that stirs and moves young minds. It is, indeed, special music, and there may be something sublimely recognizable about its opening theme that makes it particularly easy to follow the unfolding of the classical form. I will settle for a hymn of praise for what happens in the last 30 seconds of that slow movement, when Mozart, halfway out the door, turns and flings one more handful of stardust at us all.  Go listen to it; I can’t say more without breaking up. Oh yes, there is one more place where the same thing happens: the “Sextet of Recognition” in the third act of “Figaro,” when Susanna comes around to accepting that matters have resolved themselves for the better and that Figaro is truly hers.
Anyhow, I will go anywhere within reason to hear K. 448 performed, but I wasn’t made to believe that Manny Ax and Fima Bronfman, who drew a full and happy house to Disney last Wednesday, cared more for playing this work than for the big noise of the rest of their program: the Brahms “Haydn” Variations and Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances” (both works originally composed for two pianos) and Bill Bolcom’s lightweight, charming, half-rag half-olé “Recuerdos,”
FRIDAY NIGHT AT THE PHIL: Tom Adès and Berlioz…no, Tom Adès IS Berlioz. From the arrogance of the lightning-strokes, the thunder-claps, the take-me-as-you-will amorosities in the “Royal Hunt” music from “The Trojans” it seemed a very short leap of cred toward the orchestral slashings, the choral outcries, the brooding cynicism of  “America: a Prophecy.” It was right for Tom, in his endearingly shy and halting way, to explain from the podium that his “America” in this instance referred to the arrogant, threatened Mayans facing their Spanish invaders. His music, nevertheless,  sounded a more universal – let’s even say “contemporary” — arrogance that caused many timid souls in the audience to depart before his second work on the program, the far gentler,  radiantly beautiful “Tevot.” Theirs the loss.
At 37, Adès stands alone, beyond imitation. Every new work defines him afresh. “Tevot,” a Hebrew word meaning “ark” as in the Noah legend,  the baby Moses and also the cabinet holding the sacred texts, is for Adès a symbol of peace. It is also for him a kind of Second Symphony, after the sensational “Asyla” that really sent him into orbit a mere decade ago. His orchestra is huge, not to batter down walls, but to achieve an exactitude  of rich, varied sound – as Berlioz also knew how to do, even in his youthful, dopey “Francs-juges” Overture. The music of “Tevot” rises out of turmoil, but subsides gradually, over some 15 minutes. Its last sound is an unforgettable almost-silence; it put me in mind of the Mahler Ninth, not for a similarity of actual sound, just for the feeling it created among my ribs.