So I've Heard

If the Philharmonic’s first-of-2002 concert should be remembered at all — and I see no special reason why — it ought to be tagged in the index as “D-minor Turgid.” D minor is a dangerous key anyhow: icy and menacing. (The immortal Nigel of Spinal Tap pegged it exactly: “The saddest chord known to man, it sends everybody instantly to weeping.”) Beethoven rescued us all by steering his Ninth Symphony finally into D major‘s sunnier climes. Schoenberg was not so kind, and Brahms’ halfhearted salvation was rendered murky by the, well, Brahmsian orchestration.

Would Brahms‘ First Piano Concerto claim our attention today if its composer hadn’t also composed the Clarinet Quintet and the Fourth Symphony (to cite my own choice as the least unbearable of his works)? Would Schoenberg‘s Pelleas und Melisande still be performed today if its composer hadn’t gone on to Pierrot Lunaire and the Third String Quartet? Musicology needs a comparative study, with built-in trash can, to save mature composers from their early indiscretions. And the Philharmonic needs something similar, to prevent these two indigestible lumps from appearing on the same program and thus beclouding an otherwise warm and sunny afternoon.

Schoenberg‘s exasperating exercise runs nearly 45 minutes. His first and (Gott sei Dank) last attempt at large-scale descriptive orchestral writing, Pelleas assigns recognizable themes to the characters in Maeterlinck’s haunting, symbolic drama, and to some of the concepts as well. They mix in a steady stream of clotted counterpoint, out of which some sense of dramatic narrative may be discernible. The model seems to be the Heldenleben of Richard Strauss, who befriended and helped the young Schoenberg upon his arrival in Berlin. If you believe, as I once did, that Ein Heldenleben is the ugliest of all major orchestral works, you don‘t know Schoenberg’s Pelleas. Its apologists point out that Schoenberg had not heard Debussy‘s operatic setting, and that he should not be judged against that great score. Unacceptable: Schoenberg may not have known the opera — which had had its Paris premiere shortly before he began work on the tone poem — but he must have known the play itself, enough not to betray its spirit in his music.

I am perhaps unduly irritated by the time wasted — the orchestra’s, Esa-Pekka Salonen‘s and mine — by this inferior addition to the current Schoenberg observance. The Philharmonic may have initiated the celebration, inevitable given the fact of Schoenberg’s residence and his death here 50 years ago. But its contribution, as I have noted before, has been strangely skewed toward a preponderance of the early works, which has had the perverse effect of leaving no real clues as to why we‘re bothering to celebrate him at all. To justify this attention we would need at least the Violin Concerto, the Variations for Orchestra and even the Music for a Film Scene — plus a Chamber Music Society concert including the Serenade andor the Suite. We did get the Piano Concerto, another great work, but if you recall, it came gift-wrapped in spoken assurance — by performers and management — that it wasn’t going to hurt a bit. You have to wonder whether that hasn‘t been the attitude behind this entire venture. None of this happened during last season’s Stravinsky festival, which also included some fairly scary music (along with some deadly dull).

Some of the major holes in the Philharmonic‘s “Schoenberg Prism” have been filled in by other local organizations. The Villa Aurora, that storybook palace in the Palisades where Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger once lived, has sponsored talks and symposiums, including a celebration of Schoenberg’s onetime assistant Leonard Stein on his 85th birthday. Stein himself braved — with 85-year-old fingers, to be sure — the whole of Schoenberg‘s piano music at one of the “Piano Spheres” concerts he helped to organize. The Los Angeles Opera brought over Berlin’s Moses und Aron, praiseworthy in both motivation and performance. Southwest Chamber Music has helped fill in the list with the quartets and late works, including the String Trio and the Violin Phantasy. Unfortunately, many caring concertgoers have lost confidence in the group‘s performing standards — a shame, in view of the enterprise of its programming.

The most recent Monday Evening Concert at the County Museum formed what I would consider the crown of the Schoenberg celebration — prismatic or otherwise. The excellent Parisii Quartet performed, somewhat changed in personnel from their last performance at LACMA, but no less marvelous in their control of both sound and impulse. They played the Schoenberg Third Quartet, Anton Webern’s Five Movements and Alban Berg‘s Lyric Suite: the excelsis of the master’s expressive manner and its extraordinary echoings in the work of his most prominent disciples.

To my thinking, the Third Quartet represents Schoenberg compleat, the ultimate demonstration of the potential of his dangerous musical theories. The work is pure 12-tone; yet from the very start, the solo for first violin that wraps caressingly around the agitated figuration by the other three players, you sense a melodic process — as you might in a Haydn Quartet from 150 years before. You hear themes, hear them broken up in a developmental way, and recognize them as they return. The music is appealingly vivacious, even at times witty. The slow movement, the long lines tracing patterns of pure if chilling beauty, holds you spellbound. Everything works, and, before you have the chance to check your watch, it achieves a logical, satisfactory ending.

Webern and Berg took their master‘s teaching in almost exactly opposite directions: Webern to the extreme of compression where a single turn of phrase, even a single note played pianissimo, can send up incendiary showers; Berg with occasional strayings from the strictness of The System in the cause of exuberance and romantic outpourings. All three composers, each in his own way and at his own pace, arrived at beauty; the young Parisians of last week’s splendid ensemble joined them there. That spectacularly good concert furnished the justification we had been needing for the current piling up of honors in this Schoenberg retrospective. It was a long time in coming.

At the County Museum last week, a fair-size crowd sat through Morton Feldman‘s Crippled Symmetry with remarkable attentiveness, the near silence in the auditorium blending into the near silence on the stage. Two or three people left before the end. I counted six coughs — of which three were mine. The piece was listed to run 90 minutes; it ran close to 110. I heard no complaints. Three members of the EAR Unit — Amy Knoles on glockenspiel and vibes, Dorothy Stone with her two flutes, Vicki Ray at piano and celesta — performed in such a way that “heroic” would be only the beginning of the deserved praise.

I’m never sure what to say, or even think, about Feldman. For anyone who once knew him, the discrepancy between the sound of him (deepest Bronx) and the eloquence of his written perceptions — not to mention his music, which is mostly fashioned out of air — is an unsurmountable mismatch. His essay also called Crippled Symmetry runs 14 large pages; when I‘ve struggled through it (trying as hard as I can to keep the sound of Morty himself out of my ears), I find myself agonizingly overinformed in matters including Webern, Cage, the “crippled symmetries” of certain Middle Eastern rug patterns and the mathematical formulas they may — or may not — generate. Does the music called Crippled Symmetry depend on my assimilating all this writing of the same name? I’m not sure.

I ask because the music itself, even without recourse to patterns and formulas, is so extraordinarily beautiful. It hovers; it sends out flickers of light; its three players engage in discourse far removed from the reality of a drab museum auditorium, or from the fact of 8:30 on a Wednesday night. Given the fluidity of the music, its way of casting silvery strands across silences, I am always amazed at the exactitude of Feldman‘s scores — this piece, and also his For Philip Guston, which calls for the same instruments but runs twice as long.

A Feldman experience, 14 years after his death, is as close to an act of communion as any music I can think of from Western civilization. The recordings, even the ones garnished with my program notes, simply don’t make it. It demands live performers and live listeners sharing the same air.

January‘s entry on the Los Angeles Opera schedule originally called for three performances of a Spanish-language version of Lehar’s The Merry Widow, to follow the English-language production that had thudded across the Music Center stage the month before. As the better part of valor, La Viuda Alegre gave way instead to a concert program of zarzuela excerpts — which in turn gave way to a one-shot half-zarzuela–half-Viennese-operetta evening. This is what actually transpired last week, which is not the same as saying that it should have. Some of the Widow‘s English-language cast, who had also been scheduled for the Spanish version, now found themselves singing Lehar’s bits and pieces in the original German. Never question the inscrutability of opera and its world.

The resultant confusion of tongues made for an evening somewhat less than zippy. You didn‘t need your Spanish lessons to recognize where the loyalties lay that night, onstage and out front as well. The Viennese stuff started well enough: John DeMain guiding the orchestra through a nicely nuanced, insinuating Fledermaus Overture. From there, however, it was downhill: Julia Migenes in an unequal struggle with a showoff number from Countess Maritza, Placido in a graceless “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz,” Virginia Tola and Charles Castronovo reprising their Merry Widow duet (but this time in a hesitant German), and a helter-skelter dash through Fledermaus’ enchanting “Duidu, duidu” ensemble.

Came the zarzuela half, and the temperature in the hall rose noticeably. Tola repeated her steamy “Cancion Española” that had won hearts during the Domingo-sponsored “Operalia”; she and Domingo sang the big duet from El Gato Montes (not exactly a zarzuela, however) that the L.A. Opera had produced in 1994. Migenes, though part Puerto Rican, sang exactly nada in the Spanish half. The grand restoration of the zarzuela repertory, promised by Domingo year after year as a potentially valuable bridge builder to the Latino community, remains unbroached.

A program note dedicated the above proceedings to the memory of Peter Hemmings, the Los Angeles Opera‘s founding general director, who had died the week before. Where others had failed, or succeeded only halfway, Hemmings planted the operatic seed in the Los Angeles cultural desert and nursed it into full bloom. Determinedly ignoring a chorus of naysayers, charming a support structure into existence by dint of soft-spoken earnestness and elegant British tailoring, Hemmings came to Los Angeles with the mission of founding that city’s first-ever world-class opera company, and fulfilled that mission with surprising ease. Even the ultimate omen — the curtain that stuck halfway up at the opening-night Otello — did not block his upward path. When he retired in June 2000 — yielding his place to his hand-picked company superstar and logical successor, Placido Domingo — his 14-year-old Los Angeles Opera had long shaken off its initial omens and challenges.

He moved wisely and well. Installing Domingo as resident superstar gave out word that the Los Angeles Opera would rise above the city‘s boondocks reputation. A fine mix of repertory and exotic items — Otello, Butterfly, Fiery Angel, Wozzeck, Mahagonny, Don Giovanni, the complete Les Troyens — enhanced that reputation. So did some enlightened backstage choices: Goetz Friedrich to stage Otello and Janacek, David Hockney to design Tristan und Isolde, Peter Sellars to move Pelleas et Melisande to a Malibu beachfront, Simon Rattle to conduct Wozzeck. As in the case of any company afflicted with high ambitions, there were duds here and there; we local critics could count on a couple of yearly one-on-one confrontations, over a splendid lunch, to defend (with score sheets and full documentation) this inadequate conductor or that tottering diva.

From the start, Hemmings appended an active Resident Artist apprenticeship program to the company’s operations, out of which several major artists have emerged — baritone Rodney Gilfry for one, a walk-on in the company‘s first night and now a worldwide star. Hemmings’ final Los Angeles production was a triumphant Billy Budd with Gilfry as Billy. Like that star, the Los Angeles Opera had grown impressively — from a 22-performance first season to well over 60, most of them sold out, in Hemmings‘ final year.

In 1998 Hemmings was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire. He returned to England in the summer of 2000 and, after a brief bout with cancer, died at his home in Dorset, survived by his wife, Jane, and five children.

As is proper, we start a new year with Genesis. In 1943 the notion befell a modestly endowed but immodestly ambitious Hollywood music man, Nathaniel Shilkret (born Schuldkraut, uncle of the late Wayne), to turn nothing less than the Book of Genesis into music worthy of its words. He enlisted six European composers then refugees in California — Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Alexandre Tansman, Darius Milhaud and Ernst Toch — added his own name to the list with becoming modesty, and set them all to creating a seven-movement Genesis Suite, which was duly performed and issued on six 78-rpm discs on the Artist label. The last thing anyone could have dreamed of would be to have this curious if naive venture in self-aggrandizement turn up again on discs.

Yet there it is on a new Angel CD, the old performance conducted by Werner Janssen, with a Hollywood pickup orchestra that raises the concept of sloppy to expressive heights, with the verses intoned by the trombone-voiced Edward Arnold. The music is as bad as you might imagine, with Stravinsky handing off a few pages of Firebird discards, Tansman, Shilkret and Toch rekindling the opening-credits style that kept them fed in their Hollywood years, Milhaud‘s “Cain Abel” section appallingly unable. Schoenberg, however, apparently incapable of creating authentic trash, sent along a taut, beautifully organized canonic piece — for the section titled “The Earth was without form . . .” (!) The whole suite lasts nearly 50 minutes without form or reason, yet it belongs among the documents of bygone California culture now being trotted out for local delectation — or, in some cases, embarrassment.

Further notes on a lingering death: Billboard’s latest “top classical” chart lists three Bocellis and two Yo-Yos among its first 10, with nary a Beethoven symphony or anything else of comparable substance. (In fairness, I should note that Murray Perahia‘s Goldberg Variations comes in as No. 11.) If a blind tenor can make it that big, you’d think there‘d be room for a deaf composer; obviously Ludwig’s greatest handicap was the failure of impulse in his management.

More dire are the rumors from the mysterious East, that The New York Times may be entering into a dumbing-down policy in its serious-music coverage. Arts and Leisure editor John Rockwell, who brought to the paper a lively ecumenical view — that music‘s many faces were equally deserving of coverage, that music in lofts and clubs was as worthy of notice as Lincoln Center — has left (“jumped before he was pushed,” says one trustworthy source). The talk at the paper is that “elitism” is on the way out, pop culture is on the rise, and that other major papers around the country are taking heed. I look into the mirror these days and see an avatar of a dying breed, a dinosaur. Mark Swed, Dick Dyer, Alex Ross, yrs trly: interesting, how many surviving music critics are four-letter words.

Ned Rorem endures. Composers try to write; writers sometimes try to compose; what’s special in Rorem‘s case is the mingled lights his command of one art sheds upon the other. On a recent Naxos release, Carole Farley sings, and wonderfully, an hour’s worth of Rorem songs, 32 settings of texts mostly American — Whitman, Stein, Frost, Roethke, et al. — and what first comes across is the absolute grace in the way music and words curl around one another. (Rorem‘s presence at the piano is a further enhancement.) Listen, and then pick up A Ned Rorem Reader (Yale University Press), a culling — skillfully chosen by J.D. McClatchy — from writings over half a century.

What amazes here, and warms the heart and raises the hackles, is the further light these essays, diary entries and interview snippets cast on a composer endowed with the insights to winnow out the music in those poems. The adolescent loner in Chicago’s cruising parks and New York gay baths, the slowly ripening Adonis handed around the Parisian salons, the emerging wisdom of the mature musician — with a 1977 essay on Debussy‘s Pelleas et Melisande that always makes me weep — you meet these in the book, and meet them in the music as well. Rorem’s previous books contain some of what‘s here, but this small, artful epitome, the right size for air travel or bed, goes with you and stays with you.

Inevitably, there must be start-of-the-year lists. Memorable 2001 events: Handel’s Giulio Cesare in the last L.A. Opera season planned by the late Peter Hemmings, to ensure continued fond memories of his leadership; Wagner‘s Lohengrin in the new regime’s first flight, to mend in one glorious outing many previous inadequacies. The Philharmonic‘s Stravinsky and Schoenberg celebrations, not only for the Music Center concerts, but for the ancillary events all over town, including, above all, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s sizzling Green Umbrella performances of Stravinsky‘s Octet and Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony. Marino Formenti‘s two sets of new-piano-music concerts: at LACMA in February and at Eclectic Orange in October, with the Jean Barraque Sonata again receiving the jaw-dropping performance it had the year before. Exquisite French Christmas liturgy, at Irvine and Royce Hall, elegantly produced by Paris’ Les Arts Florissants. Composer Osvaldo Golijov, at Ojai last summer, at the Philharmonic in the fall and, on disc (Hanssler Classic), in the exhilarating Passion According to St. Mark — proving the possibility of re-expressing the Bach spirit without the process of diminution favored in other circles (e.g., the misguided but inexplicably popular Morimur, also recently on the charts).

Significant recordings: John Adams‘ El Niño on Nonesuch, a retelling of the Nativity story even better without the Peter Sellars visuals that cluttered the live performances; Salonen’s own music on Sony, with his LA Variations more skillful and witty on each rehearing; Ernst Krenek‘s Karl V on MDG-Gold, the first complete recording of the other great atonal opera (alongside Moses und Aron and Lulu).

Insignificant recordings: The rash — by now an epidemic — of extraordinary no-talents, doe-eyed and doughy-voiced, elevated with virtuosic press-agentry into some kind of cloud-cuckoo musical prestige. Bocelli began it, Church and Watson moved it upward and onward. The latest arrival — via full-page ads, a Web site, PR like the Voice in the Wilderness — goes by the name of Josh Groban, age 20, with a high C indistinguishable from the mating call of a rusty file. Yet, at a visit to a local record shop last week, I witnessed not one but three dowagers of assorted ages pawing through the racks with manic esurience in search of aforementioned Grobiana. The bleat goes on.

The Philharmonic’s ongoing ”Schoenberg Prism,“ the long-overdue tribute to the resident who endured only limited celebrity status here in his lifetime, leans with undue caution toward the composer‘s more ”accessible“ side — the post-romantic works like Transfigured Night, Pelleas and Melisande and the chamber symphonies. Other organizations in town — the County Museum and Southwest Chamber — are braving the sterner stuff, the last quartets and the String Trio. And the most substantial contribution to our awareness of the stature of this towering if forbidding seminal force in contemporary music came, unimaginably, from the Los Angeles Opera. This most unlikely of all agencies, for one unforgettable night, imported to our midst the forces to honor the least understood and least understandable of all Schoenberg’s scores, the opera Moses und Aron, in its first-ever local hearing. Given the aura of information (not to mention misinformation) surrounding the work, you can well imagine that the opera management approached the project with some trepidation; a couple of weeks before the performance, in fact, there were rumors in high places that it was to be canceled. Measure that against the 2,444 ticket holders — not a full house at the Chandler Pavilion but a greater figure than the capacity of the world‘s more sensibly designed houses — most of whom cheered themselves hoarse at the end.

You cannot argue the fact that Moses und Aron is a score difficult to love. I’m not at all sure that Schoenberg, even if he had found the time and support to complete the work beyond its finished two (of three) acts, meant it to be loved. The MGM episode in his early Los Angeles days — Schoenberg proposing a score for The Good Earth that would all be intoned in the speech-song that Moses uses in the opera, and for a reimbursement of $50,000 in 1935 dollars — suggests that his view of the purpose of sung drama was little related to such realities as happy movie audiences or producers. Moses und Aron, even unfinished, is a vast speculative work on the nature of faith and the faithful; like the grotesques in the margins of medieval writings, the pagan outbursts in Act 2 establish the dialogue. What astounds us in Moses und Aron is the virtuosity in its creation; derived from a single tone row, but with the richness of language to hold the attention over two hours, it was to become for Schoenberg the ultimate proof of his musical methods as they serve his art — and also as they serve his God. It is the strength of his arguments, and ultimately of his proof, that holds an audience spellbound in the presence, however unfulfilled, of Moses und Aron.

That presence was stunningly created here by the forces from Berlin: the Rundfunk (Radio) Choir, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, the veteran bass-baritone Franz Mazura, who sang-spoke the words of Moses, and the American tenor Donald Kaasch, who handsomely managed Aron‘s visionary coloratura. There was no staging, beyond that of vocal soloists in smaller roles being spotted here and there through the orchestra and offstage. I have seen three settings — the U.S. premiere in Boston, Achim Freyer’s marvelous production at the New York City Opera and the Met‘s of two seasons ago; I have never been more fully overwhelmed by the work than this time under Kent Nagano’s conducting. I have also never, on any stage, heard a large chorus perform challenging music with the thrilling, astounding clarity of that Berlin ensemble.

It‘s quite the town, you gotta admit, where in a single week on the same stage there can transpire two operas as unalike as Moses und Aron and The Merry Widow and performances — on separate programs — of not one but two of Edward Elgar’s elephantine monstrosities. For Elgar‘s First Symphony I have no praise whatever. It’s not only that he drags our patience across the torturer‘s rack trying to figure out how to end the damn thing; he doesn’t even seem to know how to begin it. It‘s as though we opened a door by accident on some pompous and ancient baronet wallowing in a mud bath from which he has lost the power to emerge. Fifty minutes later, he’s still there. Even after Joshua Bell‘s showoff performance of Leonard Bernstein’s pretentious and desiccated Serenade, and even in David Zinman‘s obviously devoted performance, the Elgar First groaned along its painful path. Must such things be?

But the Violin Concerto, a few days later, is another story; this is equally terrible music, and I love every bar. It takes 45 minutes to say absolutely nothing, but does so with such earnestness, grabbing your lapels and shaking you into submission, that you have to give in. Melodic substance is lacking; the First Symphony is a veritable Blue Danube by comparison. The soloist traces circles and ovals around the vast gulps of air where the tunes ought to be. At the end the orchestral strings jiggle their fingers across the instruments to make a soft, distant roar over which the soloist goes up, down and across in an utter void. You sit there, enthralled that someone might have the gall to pass this off as a legitimate concert experience, yet when the Elgar Violin Concerto eventually gurgles its last, something inside — the ache of disbelief, perhaps — makes you want to hear it all again.

And so I sat through Pinchas Zukerman’s amiable saunter through the music, wondering at times what he, Zubin Mehta and I were doing in that hall at that time, yet consumed with eagerness to rush home and listen again, this time on the EMI disc of Nigel Kennedy‘s sizzling version with Simon Rattle. My trajectory was slowed by the Mehta Rite of Spring, with its exaggerated dynamics and Straussian ritards, which ended the program. The year that began with Salonen’s exhilarating dash through Stravinsky‘s Technicolored thickets thus lurched to its inglorious conclusion. Oh well, it made the Kennedy Elgar, at home, all the better.

The Moses und Aron made it impossible to hear the second half of Jeffrey Kahane’s survey of the Beethoven piano concertos with his Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and also makes it impossible to find space to write about what I did hear (concertos 2, 3 and 4) in language of proper effulgence. Simply put, this was some of the most beautiful solo and orchestral playing I have heard all year.

The Merry Widow here, The Merry Widow there: twice in four days, and twice betrayed. Shouldn’t there be a Purple Heart for critics?

Having found much to deplore in the San Francisco Opera‘s current jihad against Franz Lehar’s endearing and enduring theater piece, my colleague Mark Swed ventured the assurance that the Los Angeles Opera‘s staging — same performing version, same set and costume designer, same stage director — would still, somehow, rise above the disasters up north. In one respect his confidence was justified; audiences at the Music Center have, at least, been spared the ludicrous update that trendy Wendy Wasserstein was engaged by San Francisco to inflict upon Christopher Hassall’s bland but serviceable 1958 Englishing. Within five minutes of the curtain‘s rise at San Francisco’s Opera House, the audience — rather sparse, in fact, the night I went — was beguiled by cute jokes about mutual funds and rolling blackouts.

Otherwise, it breaks my heart to relate, I find little reason to extol one performance over the other. Both use the overstuffed, waterlogged performing edition that was dreamed up in 1981 by San Francisco‘s Lotfi Mansouri and Richard Bonynge as a showcase for Mrs. Bonynge, the eminent Joan Sutherland. To Lehar’s generous 80-or-so minutes of music were added an interminable ballet and a big choral number from elsewhere in the Lehar canon — from the operettas The Count of Luxembourg and Paganini, to be exact. With these encumbrances plus the Wasserstein script, San Francisco‘s production clocked in at a near-Wagnerian three and one-half hours. Even without the spurious new text, the Los Angeles version, a mere 20 minutes shorter, doesn’t exactly zoom. The Los Angeles Widow is a borrowed production produced last year at the Utah Opera; San Francisco‘s is newly built. Both use Michael Yeargan set designs, Thierry Bosquet costumes and Mansouri’s directorial hand; they are as nearly identical as never mind. Was everybody paid twice?

Yeargan‘s sets fill the eye with a pastiche of Art Nouveau Paris, including the swirls and squiggles of Hector Guimard’s subway entrances; Bosquet‘s fin-de-siecle costumes float free of gravity’s constraints. At the Widow‘s first entrance — sheathed in blazing red atop a staircase and surrounded by white-tied admirers — you had to wonder if another Dolly had been cloned. On San Francisco’s podium there is Erich Kunzel; here there is John DeMain; either presence should, you‘d think, guarantee the proper style for congenial musical theater. But no, not in this cluttered, lumbering, joyless pageant.

In San Francisco, Australia’s Yvonne Kenny has some sense of this style: the wisdom, the cynicism, the lustrous voice; I hear little of that from Los Angeles‘ Carol Vaness, the latest sad instance — of which we’ve had several — of this fine singer unsuitably cast. By far the best performance in either cast is Rodney Gilfry‘s sly, insinuating Danilo, dancing such alluring rings around Vaness’ woodenness as to make her look positively airborne. Next month Gilfry takes on the Danilo for San Francisco‘s later performances, to Flicka von Stade’s Widow. Now that might be worth the trip. ”Might,“ I said.

For a couple of weeks last month, Jean-Yves Thibaudet was all over town: a couple of pop-classic concertos with the Philharmonic, chamber music at Skirball‘s Ahmanson Hall, jazz (or so it was billed) at the Knitting Factory, a visit to a public school, a master class at Zipper Hall, all gathered under the Philharmonic’s new artist-in-residency program. He‘s a handsome fellow and infinitely charming, and his manner suggests full awareness of those attributes. As he made his way through the prickles of Poulenc’s garrulous, blithely tongue-in-cheek Sextet (with Philharmonic members, at Ahmanson), you could hear the piece as a self-portrait, of composer and performer alike.

The Knitting Factory gig ruffled a few feathers, however. Abetted by a motormouth stooge named Joel Silbermann, Thibaudet tossed off some simplistic, nay patronizing, insights about jazz that suggested little awareness beyond what you get from record-album notes. His playing — of arrangements of arrangements of Bill Evans and Ellington arrangements — was tidy and spiritless, with none of the suave, blithe rhythmic command that had lit up his Ravel, Poulenc and Gershwin. So, for that matter, was the sense of the whole event, which played down to a distinguished and savvy audience that had come to celebrate the coolth of a Philharmonic event in a Hollywood rock club.

The master class at Zipper made amends. For over an hour, Thibaudet listened with great care as five young Colburn School students went through their offerings. His comments, in all cases, went to the cores of problems, the mechanics of playing and the rewards that come with mastery. I‘ve been to master classes that turned into ego trips for the visiting artists and had no value (beyond intimidation) to the students. Thibaudet’s was different; in his reaching out to these youngsters I sensed the presence of a caring musician.

Les Arts Florissants (”The Arts a-Blooming“) takes its name and its inspira-tion from a work by the prolific Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704), who ended his years as organist at the Sainte-Chapelle. If you can summon visual memories of that extraordinary space, with Parisian sunlight pouring through its floor-to-ceiling stained glass, you‘ll get a fair likeness both of Charpentier’s own music and of the sounds of the ensemble that honors his name. William Christie, who founded the Paris-based group in 1979, actually hails from Buffalo, but that doesn‘t seem to have undermined his success in revealing to French audiences a part of their own musical glory.

At Irvine’s Barclay Theater (and the next night at UCLA‘s Royce Hall), the group — 20 singers, 27 players — sang Charpentier’s holiday music: an Advent antiphon, a small Christmas oratorio, and the well-known Midnight Mass, in which old French carols form the substance for an actual Mass celebration. ”Exquisite“ comes most readily to mind, yet there was nothing of the prissy or timid in the performances under Christie, as that term can sometimes imply. The whole evening, not a moment too long, became a transport back to a part of music‘s lustrous past, its vivid colors newly, honestly restored.

In 1989 a group of Soviet composers brought their music to Boston, most of it for its first American hearings. There were some familiar names among the group; music by Schnittke, Shchedrin and Kancheli had already leaked out of the Soviet Union in those early days of glasnost. One name, however, was completely unknown. A Soviet information agency had set up a listening room where critics could sample discs and tapes, and the music that proved the most astounding was by Sofia Gubaidulina: a huge violin concerto called Offertorium that was built around a gloss on J.S. Bach‘s A Musical Offering, and a weird virtuoso romp for nothing but solo bassoon and an orchestra of low strings. Gubaidulina was at the conference: a small, dour figure in her late 50s, presiding over further revelations of her strange, distinctive musical outlooks in which such diverse elements as folk songs from her Tatar ancestry, Schoenbergian atonality and American jazz and pop clashed delightfully. Discovering her and her music was, for many of us in Boston that week, the most memorable event.

Now Gubaidulina is better known, and recent photographs suggest that she has learned to smile. The Kronos plays and records her music. The Offertorium is on the Philharmonic schedule for late February, with concertmaster Martin Chalifour as soloist. Some of her best discs, including two versions of the Bassoon Concerto, have already come and gone, but just this month there are three new recordings of major works, sharing in common a kind of dark, elegiac ecstasy and the power to raise goose bumps.

One is the product of the unique commissioning program wherein the Stuttgart-based International Bach Academy elicited four full-evening settings, from four composers of diverse backgrounds, of the Passion narratives (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) as a celebration of last year’s Bach anniversary. All were recorded at their Stuttgart premieres, and I‘ve already written about Wolfgang Rihm’s Luke and Osvaldo Golijov‘s Mark — both, like the Gubaidulina Johannes-Passion, on Germany’s Hanssler-Classic label and, I‘m sorry to say, easier to find via Internet mail order than at your neighborhood record store (Tan Dun’s Matthew is due out on Sony, whenever). However you may bemoan the fate of contemporary serious music, this celebration of the continuity of the spirit of Bach, as evidenced in these commissions dreamed up by the Bach-Akademie‘s Helmuth Rilling, constitutes a repertory of reassurance.

Like Golijov’s Latino-Hebraic Mark, Gubaidulina‘s John draws from her own mingled ethnicities — Tatar, Russian Orthodox, Jewish. Her text is the account of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion in John‘s Gospel — tragic and mystical, as we know from Bach’s setting of the same words. Into this, however, she has also spliced John‘s words from Revelation, the close-to-pagan evocation of the Day of Judgment. Her music swings back and forth from these extremes. The solo basso and the low voices from the chorus evoke the sounds we know as Russian liturgical — from Rachmaninoff’s Vesper Service and the old Don Cossack Choir records; then there are huge drums, brass and bells to inundate the senses with fear and exultation. The 91 minutes of music holds you tight: the splendor of the halo, the agony of the nails. Valery Gergiev conducts forces from St. Petersburg, and a basso named Genady Bezzubenkov will sing holes into your skull.

On EMI Classics there is Gubaidulina‘s 1997Canticle of the Sun, music inspired by two levels of ecstasy: the visionary poetry of St. Francis of Assisi and the soaring trajectory of Mstislav Rostropovich’s cello. The two ecstasies mingle; a small chorus (Terry Edwards‘ London Voices) hints at some of the saintly words, but it is Rostropovich who completes their thoughts, with a small ensemble of percussion and celesta. After the dark of the Johannes-Passion, the pure bright light of this marvelous work might even blind you. Light and shadow also jostle each other in the companion work, the 1994 Music for Flute, Strings and Percussion. Here a string orchestra, led by Rostropovich, is divided into two parts tuned a quarter-tone apart; the solo flutist — the remarkable Emmanuel Pahud — uses two instruments to accord with both groups. Elegant, featherweight glissandos seem to swaddle the music in shimmering gift-wrapping.

Gubaidulina’s Two Paths: Music for Two Solo Violas and Symphony Orchestra dates from 1999, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and released in a recent 10-disc set of archive recordings under the about-to-retire Kurt Masur. Wonderful, lush music this, cannily devised as a set of variations in which the solo violas (first-desk players Cynthia Phelps and Rebecca Young) follow intersecting paths — one up, one down, more of the light-vs.-shadow motivation that often guides the composer‘s pen. Ten discs of Masur, including several more new works (Henze, Kancheli, Tan) plus the Bach and Beethoven that you surely have in less noncommittal performances, may be a stretch, but I do find myself returning to this one 25-minute work of Gubaidulina, for its greatness of spirit and the eloquence of its language.

Ever since I sold my 78s and left home unencumbered, one of the albums that I’ve most often longed to hear again has been RCA-Victor M-193, Smetana‘s The Bartered Bride, complete on 15 shellacs, in a performance — by the Prague National Opera under Ottakar Ostrcil — that seemed at the time as pure an essence of romantic comedy as ever was. Now, I report with practically gurgling joy, it still does. Naxos, that most unpredictable of all labels, has reissued that performance on two little silvery discs that weigh about 1200 of the pristine weight, in a remastering by restorer Ward Marston, priced at far fewer 2001 dollars ($12) than the original sold for in 1933 dollars ($22.50).

After its unthrilling start as a purveyor of standard repertory in performances of dubious provenance, Naxos has now moved into territory abandoned by the majors, as preserver of the industry’s legendary past: not only complete operas but also forgotten unforgettable soloists. Marston and his crew create minor miracles in rescuing ancient sounds in their original — not beefed-up — resonance. And when Emil Pollert, the marriage broker in this newold, glorious, best-of-all Bartered Brides, sings out his “A chalupu a chalupu,” I laugh myself silly once again, and the years fall away.

The Philharmonic‘s admirable chamber-music series has moved to a new home, the recently completed Ahmanson Hall at the Skirball Center, across the freeway from the former site at the University of Judaism’s Gindi Auditorium. Neither is a satisfactory venue for chamber music. Both are too wide, undermining any sense of intimacy with the music. Ahmanson, furthermore, is uncomfortable in the extreme; the spaces between rows are hostile to knees, and threading one‘s way though them is downright precarious — especially since chamber-music aficionados tend to be of a certain age.

Nevertheless, the opening concert two weeks ago had its delights. The two big chamber works of Osvaldo Golijov, both tinged by the Yiddish side of the composer’s multifaceted background, drew the major interest and constituted such a long first half (especially after a helter-skelter series of introductory remarks) that many in the crowd left at intermission. They missed a short conceit by Heitor Villa-Lobos — a garrulous little Bachianas Brasileiras for flute and bassoon. Even more to the point, they missed a chance to revisit a work that everybody claims to know but probably hasn‘t paid attention to in years, the F-major String Quartet of Beethoven, the first of the Opus 18 series that really tied down its composer’s conquest of the musical world.

What a work! It comes on with a whiplash, a fragment of a tune that will rattle 104 times in this first movement, play off against itself in crushing dissonance, break loose and chase itself into cadences in the wrong key. Then comes an even more profound miracle, a slow movement that takes shape as an elegy of intense poignance lit as by a sliver of moonlight through clouds, and then sends those clouds, ever darkening, like ghosts across the landscape. Beethoven claimed the Tomb Scene from Romeo and Juliet as his inspiration. Another slow movement from these early years — the Largo from the Piano Sonata, Opus 10 No. 3 — pours forth the same harrowing beauty. These two movements — both in the same key, D minor — announce the arrival of a master of bone-chilling musical expression such as the world had not yet encountered. People often dismiss everything in Beethoven up to the “Eroica,” say, as derivative stuff learned at Haydn‘s knee; this work, however, clearly lets you know that it’s later than you think.

We heard Golijov‘s Yiddishbuk at Ojai last summer, in an edgier, more profound reading by the Cuarteto Latinoamericano; the Philharmonic quartet, led by violinist Mischa Lefkowitz, gave the music a more solemn sense that also worked. This is strange, powerful music; its soul lies in a set of short poems and notations by Franz Kafka inspired by his readings of Hebrew lamentations. From that source, Golijov has worked in more contemporary references, from verses by children in Nazi internment to a personal lament for Leonard Bernstein. The music is deep and dark; it cries out, and it also cries out for rehearing.

The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind is better known; the Kronos has recorded it (on Nonesuch) and plays it often. It too is deep and dark, but is so mostly to serve as ground zero for a high-flying solo clarinet that floats over the somber scene like a Chagall ghost. The ecstatic, sometimes manic music of klezmer is a major source here, not the toe-tappers of Fiddler on the Roof, more the wrenching chants that sing of six millennia of Jewish persecution and redemption. Michele Zukovsky’s clarinets — from soprano to bass — caught the down-and-dirty outcry, verging at times on outright hysteria; the Philharmonic string players, with Mark Kashper leading, followed ecstatically.

At the Music Center the previous weekend, the Philharmonic‘s Miguel Harth-Bedoya began his stint leading Golijov’s Last Round, wonderful, biting music from another side of its composer‘s multinational background. Its two movements deal with two kinds of tango and, thus, deal with the exhilaration of the young Golijov under the spell of Astor Piazzolla’s playing in Buenos Aires. Two string ensembles play at opposite sides of the stage; at the start, the first-desk players play standing up, lunging and kicking into their music and raising goose bumps on their hearers as well. Gradually the music subsides into the politer, social kind of tango. This is large-scale music; it needs a better place on orchestral programs than merely as a 14-minute curtain raiser. I told Golijov it needs a third movement; he promised to think about it.

Harth-Bedoya grows, in talent and in value to the local orchestra. Surrounding Alicia De Larrocha‘s rather tired ramble through Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain, he drew splendid, glinting colors from the orchestra. For his musical strengths as well as his obvious value to the Philharmonic‘s community, he should be locked behind bars and required to linger among us. Instead, the world bids for his services — the Fort Worth Symphony, most recently. If they ever get around to legalizing cloning, he’ll be a prime candidate.

Trash comes in many sizes, many grades. At the Philharmonic last week, the high-grade trash littered the drab, murky measures of the Brahms First Symphony; the low-grade trash lay amid the modest charms of the Wieniawski D-minor Violin Concerto. By certain public measurements, the former is generally reckoned as the greater work. By my private measurements, the Wieniawski was infinitely more agreeable. One of its moments, the bridge over which the solo clarinet (Zukovsky again) transports us from the first to the second movement, is lovelier by far than any moment in the excruciating 45 minutes of pompous oratory by which Brahms secured his foothold in the world of the romantic symphony.

Emmanuel Krivine conducted an honorable, spirited rendition; the Philharmonic‘s own Alexander Treger tossed off the concerto as the airy kitsch it truly is. Krivine, a frequent visitor, has been saddled with the two least-adventurous programs of the entire Philharmonic season, last week and this; he has been allotted more substantial fare even in his Hollywood Bowl appearances in the past. He deserves as much.