So I've Heard

The big guys had their Verdi last week: the Music Center‘s La Traviata ending its run (not a moment too soon!) at one end of I-405; Opera Pacific’s Rigoletto starting its shorter run (in happier estate) at the other. Midway there was the little opera company that could (and did): Michael Milenski‘s undauntable Long Beach Opera, fearlessly striding through the kitsch and commotion of Thomas Ades’ Powder Her Face, emerging triumphant beyond all hopes and expectations. One performance remains as these words reach you, Sunday the 18th at 2 p.m. in a 250-seat space at the Carpenter Center at Cal State Long Beach; I urge you to beg, borrow or steal your way in.

Powder Her Face is pure brat — Brit brat at that: music and drama that could only cascade from the creative mind of the preternaturally gifted 24-year-old its composer was at its time. In one sense its Duchess of Argyll belongs to the great operatic-monster tradition, from Mozart‘s Queen of the Night to Strauss’ Elektra and Berg‘s Lulu. Unlike them, however, the owner of this powdered face, memorably captured in Philip Hensher’s libretto, is a creature out of yesterday‘s headlines. Unlike them, too, both librettist and composer have filled out this monstrosity with something you could almost mistake for human dimensions.

Scotland’s Margaret Whigham (1912– 1993) became Margaret Sweeny (the Mrs. Sweeny cataloged in Cole Porter‘s “You’re the Top”) in her first marriage, and Duchess of Argyll in her second. As such, she passed a colorful lifetime fornicating her way upward through London‘s nobility and downward through its working classes into eventual penniless ignominy. (Apparently the Duke succeeded in matching her trick for trick.) With a command of musical coloration that borders on the awesome, Ades shakes this tragic, horrendous sacred monster into violent, brimming life. His music has a captivating insolent slanginess; it captures her vile, lethal breath and blends it into a range of perfumes both ethereal and stinkpot.

Neal Stulberg’s expert small orchestra — winds and percussion mostly, with occasional strings just for a touch of the slinky — worms its way in and out of the fetid atmosphere around its central character. Much of the score is beholden to the language of tango at its rudest, down-and-dirtiest. Four singers — impersonating many more characters — carry the action breathlessly forward: hotel bellhops eagerly available, chambermaids, hangers-on giggling with the latest gossip, servicing the Duchess‘ amorous needs and occasionally being serviced in return. As the Duchess, Irena Sylya’s management of Hensher‘s fleet, intricate declamation is only approximate, but the venom is vividly apparent even so. The opera’s two hours race by like the wind.

Some of my happiest Long Beach Opera memories concern the way its several stage directors have employed empty space: a flat stage floor ringed with TV monitors for Britten‘s Death in Venice; more empty space for the Mediterranean that Monteverdi’s Ulysses must cross. Long Beach‘s Powder Her Face — in its first American professional staging, by the way, after concert-style performances in Brooklyn and Berkeley — is ingeniously (if not exactly comfortably) set on a blocked-off area on the Carpenter stage, with the audience on bleachers on one side. Director David Schweizer fills the empty spaces with spooky dancing shadows. A mobile, glass-enclosed booth stands in the middle of nowhere, pushed here and there, a jeweled, cluttered museum showcase, perhaps, with the Duchess inside, possibly dead but also poisonously alive. One bellhop (James Schaffner) catches her eye, and proves a considerable mouthful. High above the action, perched atop a towering ladder up near God, a judge (the stentorian Donald Sherrill) sends down thunderbolts of condemnation. A journalist (Catherine Ireland in one of her five roles) pries into secrets and confessions. “I go to bed early,” the Duchess informs her, “and often.”

If Rigoletto isn’t broken, why does everybody try to fix it? For an opera so perfectly proportioned, its dramatic unfolding so devastating, its fund of deep, disturbed humanness so keenly set forth, the history of maltreatments ventured upon Verdi‘s first operatic masterpiece makes for a rather depressing bundle. Bruce Beresford’s Hollywoodized recasting, imposed upon the L.A. Opera two seasons ago and now up for revival on the San Diego Opera‘s agenda come January, may be the most blatant perversion yet to come down the pike, but it hardly stands alone; the English National Opera’s famous rewrite job, in English and set among lower-Manhattan Mafiosi, was still available on video the last time I looked.

Opera Pacific‘s new Rigoletto arrives from Sydney’s Opera Australia. First the good news: Almost all of the traditional cuts have been opened, with only the second verse of the Duke‘s “Possente amor” excised; the performance I heard, with the first of the two alternating casts, was close to first-rate — riding on the shoulders (strong and getting stronger) of John DeMain’s conducting; it was given, as the composer intended, in three acts, not the four that ruin dramatic continuity.

Elijah Moshinsky‘s production, with sets and costumes by Michael Yeargan, moves the action up to a time vaguely present, which gives us the Mantuan courtesans in tux and sunglasses dancing Verdi’s elegant minuet — and with the dance band not onstage as prescribed but in the pit. Rigoletto and Gilda sing their sad first duet at a kitchen table with red-checked cloth, in a tidy suburban house. Sparafucile‘s tavern is your basic American waterfront dive, at which Rigoletto and Gilda arrive by small car, probably a Rent-a-Wreck Fiat. The result, as is the case far more often than not, does nothing to clarify the story or bring it any closer; on the contrary, it comes off as a ridiculous confusion of tongues.

Christopher Robertson, the Rigoletto, was singing through an announced cold but sounded fine, nicely resonant and far more at ease than as San Francisco’s Arshak II, which we both suffered through in September. Elena Kelessidi was the pert, diminutive Gilda, and Andrew Richards, the Duke, looked for once like the handsome tenor his music attempts to embody and seldom does.

Morimur is up there on the charts, the latest implausible release from ECM, one of the few remaining labels to turn implausibility into solid musical virtue — and perhaps into a few deutschemarks along the way. The title is something Latin about dying, and the message from the disc is that thoughts about dying were the principal fuel for J.S. Bach‘s phenomenal creative energy. A German scholar named Helga Thoene has discovered tunes — or, let’s say, melodic turns of phrase — in Bach‘s secular music that also turn up in his sacred chorales. Dr. Thoene would have us believe that some of these secular works, specifically the famous D-minor Partita for solo violin with its implausibly beautiful chaconne, fairly bristle with secret messages. This partita, she points out, was published in 1720, the year that Bach’s first wife, Maria Barbara, died. Therefore, we must regard the work as some kind of elegy. We must, of course, look beyond the fact that other works in that same published set of solo violin are downright jolly.

On the new disc, the violinist Christoph Poppen delivers the chaconne in a rather juicy manner that might set proponents of historically informed performances to dark mutterings. Then the Hilliard Ensemble, the British quartet of astonishingly wide repertory, sings a selection of Bach‘s chorale settings, including the poignant “Christ lag in Todesbanden” from a Good Friday cantata; these are interspersed with Poppen’s playing of the other movements from the partita. Then we get the chaconne again, this time with chorale melodies woven into — or perhaps pushed up against — the violin solos. The whole thing is very sad, very deep and, I have to admit, damned irresistible; the acoustical setting, in an echoey Austrian monastery, enhances the effect.

It is also, I regret to inform you, very fraudulent. Perhaps it doesn‘t seem that way in the context of its companions on the aforementioned charts: Andrea Bocelli, Charlotte Church and a newcomer (to me, at least), Russell Watson, whose vibrato nearly knocked my stereo off the shelf. The process of imposing veils of sexy, romantic sadness across well-meaning baroque creations goes way back: the Pachelbel Canon (a legitimate small piece made morose in unscrupulous performances), the “Albinoni Adagio” (latter-day pseudo-archaic fakery by a certain Remo Giazotto), and, of course, all the rainbow bridges from Bach to Wagner created by Leopold Stokowski’s orchestrations of organ works, choruses, even the long-suffering chaconne.

Yes, there are points of resemblance between some of the minor-key chorales and articulations in the chaconne and countless other instrumental works. Tune detectives can have a fine time tracking these down from one work to another, and when they‘ve finished they can link arms with the people who find the face of Jesus in the burn marks on tortillas. There was a vocabulary of turns of phrase in Bach’s time, as in Mozart‘s and beyond; composers knew them, and the best composers knew what to do with them. At violinist Andrew Manze’s splendid recital last week, one of the Historic Sites events, a Bach sonata began with a close relative of the “Erbarme dich” melody from the St. Matthew Passion. Bach ripping off Bach? Secret message? Or merely a sublime composer drawing upon the musical language of his own time and celebrating its infinite variety?

Two recent discs allay, at least for the moment, my fears that the record industry has retreated into the arms of Bocelli, Watson and company — although neither disc is what you‘d call a potent chart candidate. Both contain new American works by important young — i.e., this side of 50 — composers; both, even more surprising, are on major labels. On RCA there is Steven Mackey’s Tuck and Roll, delightfully rowdy, an omnium-gatherum of new-music tricks and attitudes on both sides of that fence which used to separate “serious” and “pop” and which has now been trampled down by music like this. For all its wild, eclectic stabs, this is very assured music, and its cockiness is just right in the hands of Michael Tilson Thomas, who leads his young New World Symphony. Two other Mackey works, almost as interesting, fill out the disc; the 32 minutes of Tuck and Roll do the most to proclaim the 45-year-old Mackey as a major composer.

We already know that about Aaron Kernis, 41, whose music commands a sizable chunk of type in the latest Schwann catalog. On a recent Virgin disc, Truls Mork is the soloist, with Eiji Oue and the Minnesota Orchestra, in Kernis‘ Colored Field, originally a concerto for English horn, now recast for cello and, in the process, transformed into a far deeper work, somber at times and wildly ecstatic at others. Kernis amazes me; his growth from a sassy, try-anything wise guy to a composer of genuine profundity — and a genuine skill in commanding and inventing orchestral sonorities — should be a matter of considerable national importance. Even the Pulitzer people seem to have recognized his high quality, not exactly typical behavior for that august if often misguided body.

Finally, Der Protagonist comes to disc. Kurt Weill’s first opera was composed in 1926 to a text by Georg Kaiser, hailed with hats in the air a year before Weill‘s first collaboration with Bertolt Brecht. The work comes crusted with legend, most of it Lotte Lenya’s charming invention: She and Weill did, or didn‘t, first meet when she was the Kaisers’ au pair and he was at work on the opera. That doesn‘t matter.

It matters that this is a strong, vivid and startling work. It is full of 1920s Berlin: the hard, sardonic dissonances of the young Paul Hindemith, the bits of jazz that were sweeping the city at the time, the lingering romanticism from Weill’s studies with Ferruccio Busoni. Add the slash that Brecht‘s cynicism brought to the mix a few months later, and you have the compleat Weill of Mahagonny and Three-Penny; its roots are already here in this violent tale of jealousy and murder, tinged with Expressionist accents: Pagliacci plus Caligari, perhaps. The performance, on the Los Angeles–based Capriccio label, is from Berlin, conducted by our own John Mauceri, with Robert Worle as the leader (protagonist) of a theatrical troupe and Amanda Halgrimson as the sister he loves and then murders. It runs just over an hour, and doesn’t waste a note along the way.

It‘s now 50 years since Elmer Bernstein composed his first Hollywood film score — a forgettable college-football number called Saturday’s Hero. Now pushing 80, he‘s still at it. Thus, the celebration of his work that begins tonight at the Los Angeles County Museum — a dozen films over four weeks (see Film Calendar) — must be reckoned as both a retrospective and a salute to a career in progress. Gangs of New York, now in the works, will be his seventh collaboration with Martin Scorsese.

Those 50 years cover a lot of history, for Bernstein himself, for film music and for the industry. He came to Hollywood from his native New York with credentials in order: composition at Juilliard, a fling at a concert career, some 80 scores for Army Air Corps Radio Shows and for Norman Corwin documentaries. He came in as the contingent of European-refugee composers — Steiner, Korngold, Waxman — was slowly giving way to an American generation: Bernstein, David Raksin, Leonard Rosenman and the subsequent hordes. The LACMA series, which covers the spectrum from the 1956 The Man With the Golden Arm — generally regarded as the first major beachhead of jazz into the film-music vocabulary — to 1993’s The Age of Innocence, with Bernstein and Scorsese in period mode, honors above all the full range of what a truly savvy music man can accomplish even within the machine. These are included, along with the Oscar-winning Thoroughly Modern Millie, The Magnificent Seven and everybody‘s favorite heartwarmer, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Now, white-haired and twinkly, Bernstein sits in his sun-drenched Santa Monica studio, and radiates a sense of high approval of the way things have gone over that half-century.

L.A. WEEKLY: The first time your name really stuck with me was sometime in the 1950s, for a short film you made with Charles Eames about toy trains. It was exquisite, especially for the scoring — solo winds, like Mozart.

ELMER BERNSTEIN: Yes, Toccata for Toy Trains. [Still available on video and DVD in an Eames collection, still delightful.] I did about 30 films with Eames, the closest to genius of anyone I ever worked with. He had made some films with Franz Waxman, one of the last of the German colony, and Waxman suggested me. A film I had made, Sudden Fear with Joan Crawford, had made some noise because I had done some interesting orchestrations: solo woodwinds, and a real concerto for two pianos and orchestra to accompany a car chase. You could do that sort of thing back then, because every studio had its own orchestra, and you could work with orchestrators and bring in all kinds of unusual combinations.

But you had also had all that classical training in New York before you moved out here: composition with Roger Sessions and Stefan Wolpe, a debut piano recital at Town Hall with not-bad reviews . . .

I never intended to become a “classical” composer, beyond learning a few essentials. And the Town Hall recital got the usual kiss-off reviews: “He’s young, let‘s watch him . . .” Dime a dozen! Besides, there was enough Bernstein on the New York scene. Lenny and I became good friends, and we decided between us that he would be Bern-STINE and I would be Bern-STEEN. Even so, when he died, my daughter’s teacher at school asked if she would like the day off.

The one thing everybody seems to know about film composing is that matter of the straitjacket, of the director telling you that such and such a scene would last exactly so many seconds, and that you had to compose to fit.

You know, I never ran into that, at least not at first, not as long as the studios had full music staffs. That, by the way, was as close to heaven as I ever expect to get. Take one example, Sweet Smell of Success. That was the movie where I really worked to create a synthesis with several levels of jazz and all the other stuff. There was the big, loud New York jazz and the sneaky chamber jazz of Chico Hamilton‘s Quintet in the club . . .

There was also that beautiful sad farewell scene, with the solo clarinet.

Oh, thanks. Well, I cannot remember ever having to discuss music cues with Sandy [director Alexander Mackendrick] or anyone else. What we discussed was New York energy.

The one exception was when I did [1956’s] The Ten Commandments with Cecil B. De Mille. Now there was a director really obsessed with control: every word, every scene change, every shading. What he wanted from me was some kind of Wagner: a distinct musical motif for every character and every state of mind. But I knew all this going into the job, and I knew that if De Mille thought he knew everybody‘s job better than everybody else did, he was probably right.

One piece of advice stuck with me, however. It was from Morris Stoloff, who was music director at Columbia. He reminded me that the major difference between composing for concerts and for films was that the film audience had to get your music the first time. Nobody is going back to see the movie just to figure out your music. Now, of course, they can, with video, but Morris was basically right even so.

And now?

Now . . . yecch! Two things brought an end to that movie-studio heaven I was talking about, besides of course the end of studio orchestras and musical staffs. The first was commerce, the discovery that a film score had commercial value outside of the film. That meant that suddenly a film composer had to face a whole new question: how that score will sell — on three-minute 78-rpm records, on LP and now on CD. That has had a very bad effect on film music.

The second thing that happened was the rise of the auteur, the director who thinks he knows everything and integrates every aspect of the film into some kind of concept. The director who has to know what you’re doing, piece by piece by piece . . . that can be very inhibiting. Instead of concentrating on your own grand plan — as composer, or designer, or whatever — you have to be concerned with what the director is going to think two days from now about what you did today.

There are exceptions, of course. Scorsese does know everything, and so does Coppola. Here‘s what I did with Scorsese for Age of Innocence. We talked about the period of the piece: 1870, say. We talked about musical models: Brahms, say. Then I went to London, recorded a few themes with a small orchestra. Marty liked some of them, didn’t like some of them. But he took the themes he liked, and started to cut the film around the music. That‘s the ideal way to work, and that’s why Marty and I have done seven films together.

Every director is different, of course. Producers, too. With Alan Pakula on To Kill a Mockingbird, we did a lot of preliminary talking. We talked through every character at enormous length before I sat down to compose. But again, we weren‘t talking about seconds and minutes and feet of film; we were talking about the people who were going to live in that film.

Any favorite among those 200 film and television scores?

Oh, Mockingbird, I guess. It’s such fun to listen to, even if I did write it. I don‘t just listen to movie scores, of course. I saw the L.A. Opera’s Lohengrin, and thought it was just fine, really well staged and performed.

Did you also see La Traviata last month?

[Long pause.] It‘s a great opera, though, isn’t it?

The Philharmonic‘s presentation around Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra was a distinguished event worthy of the music — as the treatment accorded the Piano Concerto three weeks before had not been. Bold to the point of insolence, gorgeously color-splashed, this suite from 1909 (revised, but not diminished in the 1949 revision) had been substituted for the Violin Concerto, which tilts the Schoenberg content in the current celebration excessively toward the non-serial and formative works. Even so, the Five Pieces is wonderful music too seldom performed — and even less often performed as well as it was last week. The talk this time was also serious and stimulating. In the pre-concert discussion, former pupils Natalie Limonick and Leonard Stein reminisced about Schoenberg‘s classroom and private teaching. Onstage, Esa-Pekka Salonen took us through the music itself, genially and intelligently, with the orchestra demonstrating points along the way. Left to his own devices, Salonen handles this kind of chalk talk very well. (At a sold-out gathering at LACMA the night before, with Salonen and The New Yorker’s Alex Ross, the talk was less enlightened, because a pretentious and timid interlocutor seemed either afraid or unwilling to guide the conversation toward actual musical matters.) Mozart filled out the program — a rowdy but exhilarating “Jupiter” Symphony at the end, and the early G-major Violin Concerto in a larger-than-life reading by Viktoria Mullova (with a couple of real nut-case cadenzas inserted here and there).

I get the feeling that Salonen, in his heart of hearts, doesn‘t really care for Schoenberg’s music all that much, early works or late. Something about his own music, the intensity of its outreach and the exuberance of its fantasy, resounds from a different planet. (And by the way, the Sony disc that includes his fabulous L.A. Variations is now out, and who knows for how long?) All the more credit, then, for the finely motivated, richly hued reading Salonen gave of the Five Pieces, and for the deep intelligence in his explanation of the music. It will be even more interesting to hear his take in the upcoming complete survey of Shostakovich, whose music he has publicly dissed more than once.

You gotta do these things sometimes: Like a penitent in a hair shirt, I betook myself a couple of weeks earlier to the Philharmonic‘s Rachmaninoff-Sibelius program, sure that I would hate every moment but still curious as to why. Steven Stucky’s 1988 Son et Lumiere, which began the program, helped explain; it was the only music that night that took any cognizance of a symphony orchestra‘s power to create varied, arresting sounds. Otherwise there was the murky orchestral blanket around Leif Ove Andsnes’ clattering piano in Rach 3 and the agonizing buzz-buzz of Sibelius‘ Second Symphony, dispelled only by the pompous oratory of the anthem-wannabe stuff at the end.

After its sensational opening weeks, which offered much and promised even more, the local opera company returned to the old business-as-usual. First seen in February 1999 (and not exactly beloved then), its creaky, quirky La Traviata only sporadically honors the sad sorrowings of Verdi’s near-perfect musical drama. Again there‘s the willful, gimmick-ridden staging of Marta Domingo, with principal singers cavorting athletically on Giovanni Agostinucci’s stifling, resolutely retro set designs that have less to do with romantic operatic tragedy than with tickling the folks out front. From the podium there is the decent competence of Placido Domingo‘s leadership, but one misses the elegant lyrical impulse he had once brought to this opera — and probably still can — as its leading tenor.

Instead there is the squally, unfocused Alfredo of Rolando Villazon, whose stage manner furthermore constitutes a virtual parody of a scenery-chewing superstar of the old school. Ana Maria Martinez is the Violetta, her voice nicely colored by the role’s tragic overtones, but undercut by a tendency to push sustained notes toward sharpness. As the burly, harsh-voiced Papa Germont, Jorge Lagunes wields his cane like a drum major‘s baton, poised at any moment to thrash Violetta senseless.

To the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts — a haven, apparently, for touring opera companies with oversize ambitions (remember that Aida?) — came the St. Petersburg Opera, with a repertory that bore some resemblance to Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Mussorgsky‘s Boris Godunov. Both operas are relative rarities hereabouts, although Opera Pacific lists an Onegin for next February. The Boris, furthermore, was performed in the “first ——–
AUTHOR’s edition,” minus the clutter of “improvements” — including the Polish Scene — that less adventurous souls advised Mussorgsky to add later on. (The Cerritos program book, however, contained the synopsis for the later version.)

The St. Petersburg company struggles for recognition in the shadow of the neighboring Kirov; Yuri Alexandrov, its director, has worked at both houses. He brought his troupe here with a couple of dribs of rudimentary scenery, a few buckets of plastic snowflakes and a 40-member orchestra mostly young, for a tour as far east as Phoenix. In the rather slapdash Onegin, I was taken by Olga Kovaleva‘s lithe, winsome Tatyana; her Onegin, Dimitry Taneev, looked and sounded like Pushkin’s and Tchaikovsky‘s romantic hero the way I look and sound like Luciano Pavarotti. The Boris Godunov the next day was far better — again with not much stuff onstage but with a lusty, folkish edge to both sight and sound that went well with the rough edges of Mussorgsky’s pristine score. The Boris himself, Edem Umerov, sang the role at both afternoon and evening performances, with admirable clarity if no particular eloquence. Best of all was the imposing, deep-throated Elena Eremeeva, who sang small roles in both operas in the great Russian mezzo-soprano tradition and got the biggest ovation both nights.

At LACMA‘s first Monday Evening Concert, our wondrously off-the-wall EAR Unit did music with film, ending with Jeff Rona’s exceptional new score for that 1928 silent surrealist classic, James Sibley Watson Jr.‘s The Fall of the House of Usher, music that poked with high imagination into the angles and corners of that famous old cult favorite. At Royce Hall a week later, the Philip Glass Ensemble played his music for several short films, draining the air out of the hall with sounds of crushing diatonic sameness, which some people — present company excluded — seem to think they can tell from one another. This was the first program in a week of Glass-blown film. I did like the final work, Godfrey Reggio’s Anima Mundi, with its neat-o animal shots, but there was nothing there that Disney‘s Living Desert hadn’t accomplished with square-dancing scorpions in 1953, when Glass was still waiting tables.

They’re still talking about it in Stuttgart — about the night, just over a year ago, when a capacity audience in that normally strait-laced metropolis went berserk for nearly half an hour at the world premiere of a 90-minute choral work from an unknown pen. ”Was Madonna in the hall?“ asked one local paper; ”or Michael Jackson?“ queried another. It was neither of the above, however; the music at hand bore the title The Passion According to Saint Mark. Its composer was a slender, Argentine-born Jewish-American composer named Osvaldo Golijov who, he tells me, was just as exhilarated and astonished as anyone at the ovation in Stuttgart‘s spacious Liederhalle that night. And if the name Osvaldo Golijov (GO-lee-ov) still seems strange, cherish the news that he’s on his way here to help fill in the blanks, beginning with the L.A. premiere of Last Round for string orchestra this weekend, continuing with the Chamber Music Society‘s program at the Skirball Center on November 5 and going on from there.

It’s interesting enough that a musician raised in the tradition of Yiddishkeit, in a backwoods enclave deep in the heart of Catholic Argentina, would come to grips with a biblical tragedy best known among music people as inspiration for generations of German Lutheran composers. (Golijov tells me that when the commission came, he had to run out and buy a copy of the New Testament.) For this you can thank Helmuth Rilling, distinguished conductor of Bach and, more to the point, head of the Stuttgart-based International Bach Society. It was Rilling who dreamed up the notion of dispatching four composers to create contemporary settings of the Passion narrative from the four Gospels, to honor Bach — who himself had gotten around to completing only two — on the 250th anniversary of his death. All four settings — the others are by Tan Dun, Wolfgang Rihm and Sofia Gubaidulina — were performed in the summer of 2000. Three have already been released on the Hanssler label; Tan Dun‘s reworking of the St. Luke text is due out, any year now, on Sony.

Assume that all four composers took it upon themselves to assimilate the ancient texts — and their awareness of what Bach had accomplished with the words of Matthew and John — into their own backgrounds; by just that assumption the eclecticism of Golijov’s heritage is the force that kindles his amazing work. On the phone from his home outside Boston, where he teaches composition on several local faculties, he compared his own approach to the task with what Bach himself must have reasoned. ”His way was to take something in music that belonged to everyone — the Lutheran chorales that everybody sang in church — and create something transcendent around it. If he could take the DNA of his own world and translate it into his music of, say, 1730, I can do the same with the DNA of my own world. The only difference is that Bach‘s world was very narrow, and mine has been very wide.“

And it’s that breadth of focus that sends this Pasion Segun San Marcos skyward: an extraordinary mirror into which the sublime sensibility of Bach gets stirred into the exuberance of a Latino street festival. It grabs you, it holds you tight, and at the end — as the stricken Jesus filters into our sensibility to the throb of mambo rhythms while the Hebrew Kaddish sweeps over the ensemble as if from another world — you find yourself uplifted and drained. Golijov‘s score calls for orchestra and chorus, plus a fabulous array of Latin percussion. His chorus, in Stuttgart and on the recording, is the formidable Schola Cantorum of Caracas led by Maria Guinand, astounding in its ability to flip from neo-baroque complexity to the full-throated outcry of a populace in pain. At Stuttgart — and at a reprise in Boston last February — a stage-filling dance-and-mime ensemble added to the wonderment; the whole indigenous ensemble comes together next year for a national tour, including a stop at Costa Mesa’s Eclectic Orange festival.

This isn‘t the only kind of music the 40-year-old Osvaldo Golijov has turned out to enrich our lives; his catalog displays a gratifying versatility. At Ojai last summer, Dawn Upshaw sang a dark, wrenching aria that Golijov had composed for her in 1999; that work, too, has now been incorporated into the Pasion. His best-known work to date, commissioned and recorded by the Kronos Quartet, is on next week’s program at Skirball: Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind; this, too, blends — no, rams — unlikely cultures into one another, a Latin throb in the string quartet, the manic coloratura of a klezmer clarinet. On the drawing board: a violin concerto for Pamela Frank, to be performed in Minneapolis next winter.

”Certain works have to define where you come from,“ he says. ”I come from a small Jewish colony surrounded by Catholic Argentina. Almost 100 years ago a certain Baron Hirsch made it possible for a group of shtetl Jews to escape persecution by the czar and his Cossacks and set up farms in an unsettled region of Argentina. These gauchos Judeos, as they were called — ‘Jewish gauchos’ — never really assimilated. They held onto their Yiddishkeit, but they got along all right. My mother was a pianist, and she took me to Buenos Aires to hear opera and also to hear Astor Piazzolla‘s tangos. She sang to me in Yiddish, but she also got me to listen to Bach. Somehow, it all came together.“

It will be interesting to see whether the efforts of our major cultural managements will succeed in turning Arnold Schoenberg into a media hero, as they did Igor Stravinsky last season. Schoenberg himself never made it, and the account of his attempting to divert the direction of Hollywood studio music is an amusing small episode in the Los Angeles phase of his career. The Philharmonic’s observance of its “Schoenberg Prism,” honoring the 50th anniversary of his death, began early this month, with Emanuel Ax as soloist in the 1942 Piano Concerto.

Before the concert, Schoenberg‘s two sons Lawrence and Ronald, both distinguished local citizens, chatted with KUSC’s Alan Chapman about Arnold as dad and as reg‘lar feller, including reminiscences of after-dinner walks around the block and pop music on the Victrola. Before the Concerto, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Manny Ax discussed the work itself, how painless — downright Brahmsian — a piece it could be if you controlled your fears. “I often sing its tunes in the shower,” Salonen confessed.

During a QA after the concert with Ax and Philharmonic honcha Deborah Borda, Salonen further gloated about the rightness of combining Schoenberg and Beethoven on this program, leaving unaddressed whether the upcoming Haydn-Mozart-Schoenberg and Brahms-Schoenberg programs would also qualify as marriages made in heaven. The Stravinsky concerts of February and March had been nicely preceded by video clips with the old boy himself at his most ingratiating. This time there was a scratchy, close-to-unlistenable audio of Schoenberg molding an abstruse tangle of metaphors into a speech he had planned for some kind of award.

Why bother? The Piano Concerto is a great work on its own, and Ax and Salonen gave it a beautifully shaded, spirited performance that earned a proper round of cheers. But it is a secretive work, as is most of Schoenberg’s late music, and it‘s pointless to pretend that reassurances that it won’t hurt a bit are going to elevate it onto the charts. Concertos by Bartok and Berg reach out and seem to be about something beyond their music; Schoenberg‘s is, brilliantly and disturbingly, about itself. (The Philharmonic’s Schoenberg celebration skimps on the late works, by the way. The Violin Concerto, originally on for next week, has been dropped, and the Opus 31 Variations, his orchestral masterpiece, bypassed altogether.)

I had heard strong and intelligent talk from Salonen a few days before the concert, in the first of a series of celebrity get-togethers at the Santa Monica Museum of Art sponsored by Sony and the Crossroads School. More talk on this brainpower level, perhaps with musical examples, would have actually guided the audience through the thickets of the Piano Concerto. Instead, the plan seemed to be to double-talk the rare experience of hearing the work played so well down to the level of easy listening. Two days before, at the season-opening gala concert, Salonen and the Philharmonic had inflicted some of the same treatment on music by Duke Ellington — this time not playing it at all well, adding the haze of a full symphonic background to works that, of all the wonderful music in the world, needed it the least. Schoenberg‘s music had been falsified in word; Ellington’s in deed.

The Master Chorale has a new leader and, thus, a new lease on life. He is Grant Gershon, familiar from earlier days as one of the Philharmonic‘s assistant conductors and a total charmer leading the orchestra’s kiddie concerts. His opening program — Thomas Tallis‘ famous 40-part motet Spem in alium, Bruckner’s Te Deum and Philip Glass‘ Itaipu — was in itself a statement: three big works, no family-oriented fluff. The Tallis, with parts of the chorus spread through the hall answering a massed ensemble onstage, made the further statement that already, in his brief time on the new job, Gershon has found a richness of tone and a strength of phrasing that could launch the Chorale onto a new tier of musical importance. That performance level prevailed throughout the most rewarding evening, even as the level of musical quality did not. “Chug-chug,” went the Glass; “Bye-bye,” went your scribe.

The third run of Orange County’s “Eclectic Orange” began with a celebration of scope: delectable baroque opera followed mere hours later by gut-racking piano music of our own time and beyond. I have run into reservations and objections about the Mark Morris production of Rameau‘s Platee on opening night; I have none. The Prologue set in a contemporary barroom was, I’ll admit, disconcerting, but prologues to baroque operas are often set in venues different from those of the opera itself. For all his reputation as a free hand on the classic stage, Morris has stuck surprisingly close to the outlines of Rameau‘s bizarre, sometimes even cruel, danced comedy; the hot licks he allows his large and skillful cast arise nearly always from the ancient plotting of the surprisingly vicious satirical original.

The Isaac Mizrahi costumes struck a mingled note of lunacy and rococo splendor; James Ingalls’ lighting seemed to bury the whole action in a jeweled overlay. What was even more glorious was the chance to hear this kind of music, the elegant and tres French rhythms of Rameau‘s prosody, so gorgeously handled by the extraordinary singing ensemble, and the exquisite, airborne realizations of the musical ornamentations by the cast and by Nicholas McGegan’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. Now we‘ve restored Handel’s operas to their proper place; it‘s time for Rameau.

Marino Formenti’s recital was set in Segerstrom Hall‘s small Founders Hall, which may be the best piano room in all of Southern California. Works by Helmut Lachenmann (tone clusters atop tone clusters) and John Adams (the spellbinding Phrygian Gates, by now classic) began it; once again, as at Formenti’s local debut (at LACMA two years ago), the killer attraction was Jean Barraque‘s Sonata. It came in this time at just under 23 minutes — as compared to 46:23 for the estimable Herbert Henck performance on ECM (which Formenti, in a post-concert QA, confessed to not liking). An aura of suspicion surrounds the work, and has since Andre Hodeir’s ecstatic exegesis in his long-out-of-print Since Debussy. Now I find myself lingering at Hodeir‘s doorstep; the Sonata is, I come to realize, a work like nothing else in the galaxy: a fusillade in which every shot moves in its own orbit. Formenti’s first performance left me awestruck by the playing; this time the music itself held us all in its grip — all 200 or so of us in a room rendered magical. A single encore, the slow movement from Mozart‘s K. 332, was like a swallow of the best wine you’ve ever tasted.

CLASSICAL MUSIC IS DEAD ONCE AGAIN, AND ITS CORPSE HAS never been livelier. The villains have been variously identified, and the saviors as well.

Audiences dwindle. One faction says the defection has to do with too much worn-out, familiar repertory. Elsewhere, the defection is blamed on an overdose of 12-tone, electronic, minimal, Stravinsky. Musicians, too, are on the wane — or so we’re told now and then. Illustrious string players, extolled for their Bach and Beethoven, defect to the ranks of Appalachian fiddlers. Distinguished performing organizations curtail their valuable services as audiences and, therefore, funds dwindle. The Los Angeles Opera, buoyed through the beneficence of zillionaire opera buff Alberto Vilar, has barely squeaked out of a deficit — reported as close to $2.5 million — bequeathed by the previous management. Typical recent casualty: The small but worthy Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra, obliged to cancel programs last spring, starts up again this season but with a drastically cut-back schedule.

Bad enough? Consider this: Police officials in Seattle recently devised a method for clearing public spaces of gatherings of undesirables (druggies, homeless, composers, etc.). They set up loudspeakers and play classical music at high volume. The news item (NPR, August 14) didn’t say what music, although Beethoven was mentioned as a generic term for “classical.” It did say that the areas cleared presto con moto. So there we go: classical music as surrogate for the fire hose.

Still, not so bad: Well beyond 10,000 listeners poured into the Hollywood Bowl the week I wrote these words, not for show tunes or Rachmaninoff, but for all-Beethoven. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, after a couple of lean years, reports a 15 percent rise in ticket sales last season over the season before. The reborn and fizzy Orange County Philharmonic Society, with its daring programs full of adventure, nevertheless ended its last season with that rare arts commodity, a six-figure surplus. While record companies here and abroad pull back their activities on behalf of classical music, a recent survey by the RAND Corp. turns up the news that opera, considered by many the most unapproachable of all classical arts, currently boasts the highest attendance gain of any entertainment category. Best of times, worst of times: Ol’ Charles Dickens had it right.

Death and rebirth: It was ever so. On my desk is a recent screed from England’s Daily Telegraph, wherein Norman Lebrecht, possibly music’s most voluble proclaimer of gloom ‘n’ doom, celebrates his “Requiem for the Classical Record.” That goes on the shelf next to the same ——–
AUTHOR’s Who Killed Classical Music? (1998), Tim Page’s Pulitzer-winning The Way the Music Dies (1996), a sheaf of reviews from the premiere of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps . . . all the way back to Onos Lyras (“When the ass hears the lyre”), an eloquent defense of music against its naysayers penned by one Marcus Terentius Varro sometime in the first century B.C. “The death of classical music,” writes the pianist/scholar Charles Rosen, “is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition.”

Is the death rattle louder this time? Maybe so; certainly the roster of destructive forces is longer and more fearsome.

The record biz: Once a seemingly indestructible archive of everything noble in our musical culture, the industry that proclaimed and preserved the art of Caruso, Heifetz, Toscanini and Lenny totters on the cusp of self-destruction. With deadly, biblical accuracy, the fat years have led to the lean years. When a prospective customer is faced with some 80 Beethoven Fifths — including 10 by the same conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler — it’s easy to understand why he might retire in confusion. It’s just as easy to understand why major retailers — most famously Tower, with its 229 stores in 17 countries — are currently beating a retreat from the full-catalog inventory on which their customers once relied. Major producers — including the once-noble RCA (now BMG) of Caruso and Toscanini fame — cut back their recording activities to next to nil. Tower — with others sure to follow — reduces its stock of the small independent labels that once made a visit to a record store a voyage of discovery. Blame some of this on the deadly competition from that amorphous monster known as the Internet, where some customers are transformed into armchair shoppers with access to the web of mail-order dot-coms, and others are lured, via Web browser and desktop CD-burner, into downloading mere abstract content, bypassing the traditional thrill of material possession.

The edifice complex: Music’s managements project grand new temples to house their product but must distribute free tickets by the ream to paper the old temples it already owns. The prevailing marketing philosophy, since New York’s Lincoln Center opened in 1962 — followed two years later by the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the first component of the Los Angeles Music Center — has been to sell music by the container rather than the content. The resulting paradox is that the grand new buildings, most of them too large, create a cold, unwelcoming atmosphere. The Music Center is a case in point: a glum spot, badly lit, with lousy, inadequate food places, and the absurd design that elevates the whole site above Grand Avenue and stifles any possibility of street life in the area. Walk along the Grand Avenue block that borders the Music Center, and you might as well be on Skid Row for all the cultural emanations you detect. The same sterility obtains at the fancy new performing-arts center in Costa Mesa, which has no sense of site at all, only buildings separated by grass. The same at UCLA, where Royce Hall is miles from any food except the overpriced pastry they sell inside and the nearby vending machines. All this stifles the joy in music-going, and also stifles the chance to drive to one place, park, eat (or even dine), then hear some music, and then hang out and schmooze afterward. (You want emanations? You want schmooze? Try Manhattan’s Broadway alongside Lincoln Center and eat yer heart out.)

Bloat: Our concert halls and opera houses are too big, compared to the European counterparts they pretend to copy, and compared to the dimensions of the best music they are meant to house. Mozart’s Don Giovanni was first performed, in Prague’s largest theater, to a capacity audience of 750. The Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, like comparable houses in San Francisco and New York, seats over 3,000. Slickly confident that if they build it we will come, management tells us little about the new kinds of music, or the new performance values, that will inundate the new halls with the sense of their own century — not merely the cultural values of bygone centuries superficially modernized. Will there be new music for new audiences in the new halls — in the Music Center’s Walt Disney Concert Hall now beginning to gleam in the afternoon sun, in the other new one a-building in Costa Mesa, in the soon-to-be-gutted-and-rebuilt Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center? And will that new music be, as it deserves to be, newly defined? No news is bad news.

The failure of the media: Between the magnificence of our musical culture past and present, and the outside world that might seek admission to its mysteries, a vast information gap looms. Two radio stations pretend to serve the classical-music “needs” (their word, not mine) of this area: one listener- and tax-supported, the other commercial. Both are alike in the narrowness of their definition of audience tastes; both recoil from the notion of broadcasting music of less than mass appeal: no modern dissonance, no arcane medieval motets (or anything else vocal aside from a single paltry serving of opera once a week), a no-brain kibble in which masterpieces are often boiled down to single movements and Boccherini outpoints Boulez. One of the two stations, at least, generously supports local cultural activities with preview programs and informational talks. The other ignores its community, rejects the idea of arousing interest in, say, the Philharmonic’s weekly programs with free spot announcements and previews, and, indeed, originates much of its programming at out-of-town affiliate stations as far distant as Denver and Boise. You might think that the first of these would be KUSC, the local public-radio station, and the second would be KMZT, the citadel of crass commercialism. Actually, it’s just the opposite.

On the labor front: It can’t be the shortage of good performing talent that leaves time and space on our stages for the likes of David Helfgott, Andrea Bocelli and Charlotte Church; something in the panorama of performance-arts audience passions is drawn to the physical or psychological anomaly that these misguided practitioners embody, and so tickets get sold. But the situation among orchestras in the past few years, especially on the East Coast, points up an even more anomalous situation: the inability of the most prestigious, famous and high-paying orchestras to attract and hold on to the conductors they and their audiences deserve. The New York Philharmonic has made the most ludicrous choice in hiring the 70-plus, aloof, only moderately musically interesting Lorin Maazel as the latest accessor to the podium of Mahler, Toscanini, Walter and Boulez. The Philadelphia, badly in need of a little flamboyance in the successor to the solid, stolid Wolfgang Sawallisch, chose instead the solid, stolid Christoph Eschenbach. And Boston, where Seiji Ozawa has overstayed his welcome by 25 years minimum, appears headed to settle for a fraction of James Levine’s corporate loyalty while he also remains at the Metropolitan Opera and the Munich Philharmonic. One promising new conductor — an American, for God’s sake — came over from Paris (where he is an authentic culture hero), made a series of debuts with East Coast orchestras, was seen and was lavishly praised: the exceptionally smart, charming and imaginative David Robertson. He deserved any one (if not all three) of those podiums, but he returned to Paris empty-handed. Out here, Esa-Pekka Salonen comes on strong, and so does Michael Tilson Thomas. It’s getting so I have a waiting list for my guest sofa, as do my friends in San Francisco, for East Coast refugees starved for the sound of a symphony orchestra under exciting and musically honorable leadership.

* * *

Music is designed to express feelings. These are the sole subject of its communication, the only inner reality it deals with. And the difference between one state of feeling and another, as expressed in music, is largely a matter of shape — shape of melody and shape of larger form . . .

–Virgil Thomson, 1961

The product: The wisdom holds, in the calm of Beethoven’s pastoral countryside, in the exuberance of a rapper’s romance with the power of words. “Feelings,” “communication”: Thus far, at least, the performing arts are alike.

There is no definition of “classical” music that comes from within the music itself. The term is confusing. It can refer to music from a specific period — the “classical” era in which a revival of fascination with the designs of classic architecture permeated the other arts as well — or, more generally, to music become “classic” through familiarity, meant to be heard politely by a silent audience conditioned to applaud only in the right places. It is music written down by its composer, and therefore meant to be performed within its given outlines every time, give or take the enterprise of a specific performer. It is music that is marketed by being surrounded in a cloud of mystery. Descriptions of it are meant to be read with heavy emphasis on its foreign terms, preferably with an affected tone. Practitioners include radio’s Karl Haas with his prissy overpronunciations, Mona Golabek (currently into your headphones on American Airlines widebodies) with her honeyed purr that wraps TLC around artsy blather, and — remember? — the immortal Milton J. Cross, master of the singsong rhetorical plush at the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts in their gaseous heyday. Being performed in expensive, overlarge halls perpetuates the inscrutable aura that keeps the helots at bay and welds believers into a secret fellowship.

It is the one art, above all, that involves the outside world as participants in its very existence. It involves the performer, who contributes a level of virtuosity (of intellect, of fingers, of the throat) as an overlay to the work itself. And it involves the rest of us, the listeners, and it sets the ground rules of that involvement. You can walk past a painting, or take in the architectural details of a building, at any speed you choose. You can’t do that with music — not with classical music, anyway. More important, it involves us — at least to the extent of the indulgence we are willing to volunteer — in its process.

It’s that process, the composer’s stipulations on the placement of landmarks along the predetermined time frame of a piece, that sets classical music apart from — you’ll notice that I didn’t say “above” — the other kinds of music with which our universe throbs. Classical music — a Bach fugue, Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, a Pierre Boulez electronic escapade suspended in both time and space — takes up time, in carefully measured segments. The components within that time frame seem to move — toward us, away from us, perhaps both — in a sequence of statement, contrast, tension, relaxation. A three-minute fugue from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier states its subject, plays it off against itself in counterpoint that increases in complexity, and resolves the process comfortably and with high imagination. Some of the same process occurs in the first movement of Schubert’s “Unfinished” at four times the duration: a mysterious buzzing, a solo horn call as if from a distant planet, a new tune as beautiful as human mind has ever fashioned, an alternation of these contrasting elements, a resolution. Our reaction along the way — the interplay of tension, surprise, delight, release, more tension, more release — represents our participation in the process. There are different landmarks in the progress from death to resurrection over the 90 minutes of Mahler’s Second Symphony, and in the passage from void to cataclysm over the 17-plus hours of Wagner’s Ring. We may bristle at the abrasive interplay in a contemporary masterwork like Pierre Boulez’s Répons (see box), but we still can’t avoid the wonder of its communicative process, and we know after its 42-minute expanse that we’ve been somewhere, and have returned.

The process, the interaction of hearer and creator, remains the same, Bach to Boulez and beyond. What makes this kind of music “classical” is that the interplay of substance and structure has usually been laid out in advance. The great jazz people make their music new every time, and that, too, is wonderful.

* * *

Who listens? The public concert space where ticket buyers assemble to hear music performed is a fairly recent arrival: 220 years, more or less, out of the millennium or so of music we think of as accessible. Before, say, 1780, there were the patrons, the duke or prince with a music room for invited guests, a cathedral to support a choirmaster and in Italy first, and spreading northward — the opera theater with its flocks of prima donnas of all genders and its flocks of aficionados likewise. By Beethoven’s time — 1825, say — the new leisure class demanded larger halls and larger orchestras making louder noises in longer symphonies. For the next century and more, a community’s prestige was defined by its musical amenities. In the Boston of my youth, almost everybody knew at least two things: where the Red Sox stood in the league, and what the Boston Symphony was performing that week. (They also knew that the concerts were invariably sold out.) Even if you didn’t have a ticket to a live concert, you knew to anchor your weekly plans around the Met’s opera broadcasts on Saturday and the New York Philharmonic’s on Sunday.

Then came movies, then television, the LP, the CD, the Walkman, MP3, then everything else in the way of agreeably distracting alternatives to the notion of sitting well-dressed in a formal concert hall respectfully absorbing the message from onstage. The gray generations that filled Boston’s Symphony Hall in its golden days — and bustled out in anger at the first strains of Stravinsky or Shostakovich — gave way to the newcomers who pegged their musical territory to embrace Dylan along with Mahler, Machaut alongside the Stones, and who found the proscenium arch an unseemly barrier between them and us. (Some of the best news about Walt Disney Hall, by the way, is the in-the-round plan for the performance space.)

However splendid the musical offering, the fact remains that the public concert is an exercise in artificiality. A pianist performing Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations on the Music Center stage — to a full house of 3,000, if it’s Murray Perahia — is still caught up in music meant for a single harpsichordist playing for an audience of one. A gritty new orchestral piece spatchcocked between the overture and the romantic concerto on a symphony night is taking up space in a room designed for music of a far different time and place. It is, of course, good that these things happen. Murray Perahia deserves his sold-out houses, and the new composer deserves the chance to fight his way toward recognition for his originality, or to flop in full view for his banality.

Our concert halls are too large for the expectation of ticket sales, and too large for the shape of the music even in a sold-out house. (More of the good news about Walt Disney Hall is that there are roughly 1,000 fewer seats than at the Pavilion. But that’s still larger than most of the best European halls.) Since it’s a given that no major musical event breaks even from box-office receipts, even at the disgraceful $148 top for some of last season’s threadbare L.A. Opera offerings, it makes no sense to belabor the equation that seat sales equal profits. The one local exception, of course, is the Philharmonic’s Hollywood Bowl, whose nearly 18,000 seats serve as cash cow for the orchestra’s indoor activities. Nobody suggests, of course, that the concert format at the Bowl could also serve as the way things might run in Disney; you have to admit, however, that even on a slow night in Cahuenga Pass, with the expanse of empty seats big enough to accommodate the Indy 500, the 5,000 who do show up could drive an indoor-concert manager green with envy.

* * *

Music matters: Classical music’s major encumbrance is its reputation as highbrow and inaccessible. The evidence is all around, just in its language: andante con moto, rondo capriccioso. The older audience uses this erudition as a shield against nonbelievers. The younger audience, when it gains access to the sanctum, is viewed with alarm. Its members are not always well-trained, by the standards of their elders; they applaud in the wrong places, and even cheer. The elders scowl as the opera houses install screens to project translations of opera texts, crippling the out-of-reach reputation of what Samuel Johnson once referred to as “an exotic and irrational entertainment.” Yet the installation of supertitles, even at the Met, where they were opposed the longest, has brought on a huge boost in opera-going and, more to the point, opera-understanding. In the aforementioned RAND report on the state of the performing arts (theater, dance, opera, classical, other), opera was the only category that showed an income upswing over the past several years.

The highbrow thing is on the wane. If the last century began as a time of defiance and invention — Schoenberg, Stravinsky, those guys — our present and our future seem engulfed in a new wave of synthesis. Classical composition at its most abstruse crested about 1980, in the gnarled working-out of complex puzzle making as propounded by Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt. Even as this style seems to have subsided in favor of the born-again tonality of John Adams and Philip Glass, I detect some of that old-timey complexity still hanging on, not among the latest graduates of Princeton and CalArts, but in the advanced workmanship of some of the newer rockers — Radiohead, Sonic Youth, back to the well-nigh unplayable patterns of Frank Zappa. On this side of the bridge, the best music by a so-called “serious” (useless term!) composer I’ve heard in recent months is the Passion According to St. Mark by the Argentine/American/Jewish Osvaldo Golijov, in which one of the archetypal musical forms — the Passion oratorio of Bach and before — is merged into a wildly exuberant Latino street celebration. Classical? Pop? Highbrow? Lowbrow? All of the above?

John Seabrook came up with a pretty good answer in his latest book’s title, Nobrow. Seabrook, a leading light among New Yorker staffers, is thus in a position to witness the process he so rightly names from close-up, as his own publication retreats from its famous nose-in-the-air stance and becomes more relevant in the process. But “nobrow” as practiced at The New Yorker isn’t the same as the dumbing-down that also afflicts the classical scene, the evil wrought by those who would speed the transition from high- to no- at an unseemly rate. Exhibit A, the lurid marketing circus called The Three Tenors, is followed close on by the blatant falsification of the classical life in movies like Shine, and in the exploitation, bordering on cruelty, of such sideshow creatures as Shine‘s David Helfgott and the pretty-voiced but hopelessly adrift Andrea Bocelli. The dumbing-down process even spawns its own literature, tomes with names like Who’s Afraid of Classical Music and It Isn’t As Bad As It Sounds offering assurance to the tone-deaf-by-choice among us that their number is legion.

Music will survive as long as people want to listen to it. There are ways that this can be made to happen, and they all come under the heading of Making Music Matter, also known as Making People Care. The Philharmonic’s Stravinsky Festival last February triumphantly demonstrated the process. For a full month, awareness of Stravinsky’s achievements and importance were deeply impressed on the local consciousness. Museums and universities participated. Banners flew. At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, video footage of Stravinsky unfurled before each concert, almost as though the old boy himself were there to welcome us. It helped, of course, that Esa-Pekka Salonen wields a strong baton on Stravinsky’s behalf. Major critics from New York and overseas knew enough to come by for these events, and they now do so regularly. The term “cultural desert,” once regarded as synonymous with Los Angeles music, seems to have vanished from the vocabulary. Local newspaper criticism is no longer the trapeze act of virtuoso negativism it once was, and I don’t need to name names.

Down in Orange County, territory once looked upon by highbrow Angelenos as dumdum land, the O.C. Philharmonic Society’s “Eclectic Orange” Festival, about to start its third run, has proved itself hugely adventurous and, thus, hugely successful. You may have squirmed a bit at the Philip Glass Fifth Symphony last year, but it took bravery beyond the call to bring the work in soon after its headline-making premiere. (The Golijov Passion, by the way, is on next season’s agenda.) The operative word in both instances is, of course, “festival.” It’s anybody’s guess whether the magic will rub off on another of our local heroes, Arnold Schoenberg, whose music is being “festivalized” by both the Philharmonic and the Opera this season. If it doesn’t happen, it won’t be for lack of trying.

The corpse, in other words, continues to twitch.

On the Cover

Located a few short steps off Cahuenga Boulevard and remarkably soundproofed from the whir of traffic is the elegant oasis known as Robert Cauer Violins. (See “Ten Who Care.”) Clients are greeted in a Victorian-furnished waiting area, and the adjoining rooms are lined with neatly ordered stringed instruments. The few privileged enough to see the guts of this operation enter an extensive back area in which the needs of restoration and repair sprawl into several specialized rooms. It is here that Cauer and his staff coax impossible tangles of twisted strings and wood like the one pictured on the cover back to musical life.

Pierre Boulez brought his Répons here for its first — and, so far, last — hearing in the spring of 1986. It took another 14 years for a recording of the work to appear, in Deutsche Grammophon’s 20/21 Series, which, the way things look now, might be the last significant project in an industry bent on phasing itself out of relevance. Two performances took place, in a basketball gym on the UCLA campus, because this is not music designed for a concert hall, with an audience facing performers through the invisible proscenium wall. It is music to be engulfed in; it tells you to let your spirits wander through its vast spaces, and beguiles those spirits with the sounds of a new world, a new millennium. From the recording, even in a room properly set up for “surround,” that dimensionality doesn’t quite happen, although the miking has been done with care and imagination. If you’re waiting for the next live performance, don’t hang by your thumbs.

Like many of Boulez’s later works, Répons went through many gestations, first revealed as a work of 17 minutes, gradually growing to its current (not necessarily final) 42:31. The basic plan has remained. The music is flung into a large performing space from sources set around that space — pianos, harp, vibes, xylophone, all computer-processed in real time. These “respond” to a larger, unprocessed ensemble (Boulez’s great Ensemble Intercontemporain from IRCAM, his Paris-based electronic lab) in the middle. The “response” idea happens on several other levels, the interaction of musical textures not unlike the events in a Bach fugue, the interplay of contrasting thematic material similar to that which Beethoven or Schubert might employ. Some of this is fairly abstruse; nobody has ever accused Boulez of easy listenin’; what it all comes to, however, is an exhilarating sweep of sound, much of it a glorious jangle, all of it a vast sonic panorama. Some of this music is thrilling beyond words: the opening minutes, for example, which build relentlessly ahead through a hair-raising sequence of trills, culminating in the gut-grabbing first entry of the electronic forces. At UCLA, that moment just lifted you out of your seat; the marvel of the recording is that it happens there, too. In New York, on the same tour, the Times found it “a tired set of ideas in a shiny new box . . . from IRCAM’s electronic Cuisinart.” Oh well . . .

The masterpiece by, arguably, the dominant musical figure of the last 50 years, Répons belongs in that small company of between-centuries works that loom as both summation and beginning. It deals in equal and, therefore, encouraging proportion with the expressive potency of “pure” music and the horizons portended by the facilitations of technology. If not the music of the future, it is certainly one of them.