So I've Heard

If you had asked me to dream up 100 truly atrocious ideas for a new piece of music, I still wouldn’t have come up with last week’s Hollywood Bowl catastrophe. Some things are beyond the realm of
the conceivable, and in their number I would place the idea of turning Leonard Bernstein’s music from West Side Story into an exercise for solo violin and orchestra, tarted up with the ruffles and flourishes – or should I say “bowings and scrapings”? – of 19th-century virtuoso schlock. A certain William David Brohn is the perpetrator, imposing onto the one score that confirms beyond argument Bernstein’s claim to immortality a process of flagrant down-dumbing that sucks from the great music everything that gives it breath and vitality.

Why has this one score, the one unchallengeable masterwork out of all the uneven Bernstein legacy, been subjected to such blatant misrepresentation over the years? Jerome Robbins first staged the work in 1957, and devised for it an extraordinary language of rhythm and movement; every musical phrase was endowed with overpowering kinetic force. Some, but not all, of that quality endured into the movie, and into restagings under Robbins’ watchful eye through the 1970s. Bernstein himself, however, lost track of the score. Dig out the TV documentary of the 1985 Deutsche Grammophon recording sessions, with ludicrously miscast opera singers in the major roles – Dame Kiri as Maria, for God’s sake! – and Bernstein conducting with Mahlerian turgidity; that sorry commodity could stand as a milepost in the journey of West Side Story to its current disgraceful rebirth as Wieniawski redux.

In an album note for that DG recording, Bernstein reminisced about the “kid quality” of the 1957 original, the very quality that the meddlers since that time, Bernstein included, have managed to subvert. The new West Side Story Suite was inflicted upon the small but ardent Tuesday-night audience by Joshua Bell, an appealing and facile fiddler who has always functioned at the gateway to excellence without often stepping across, and who, at 33 – reckoning from his recent publicity handouts and magazine-cover appearances – is also apparently being marketed for the “kid quality.” You have to wonder, sometimes, whether the music world mightn’t be better off if people stopped kidding one another – or, for that matter, themselves.

Canada’s Keri-Lynn Wilson, 34, was the conductor that night, saddled with the Bernstein stuff in the first half, on her own in the second. Maybe it was following Bernstein that made the Brahms Second Symphony sound so good this time, but I think there was more to it than that. Tall and reed-slender, with a stick technique so clear that even a deaf person could follow her music, Wilson delivered a strong, clean account of this most ingratiating of the Brahms four; for once I was actually sorry that she left out the first-movement repeat. With a long list of past and future gigs from Hong Kong to Verona, Wilson is clearly on her way. It would be nice if that “way” included a return visit here – with a whole program of important music rather than merely half.

At 1735 Micheltorena St. in Silver Lake there still stands the modest house with the significant history: the onetime home of Peter Yates, with Rudolf Schindler’s rooftop studio where the “Evenings on the Roof” concerts – ancestors of the current Monday Evening Concerts at LACMA – were born in 1939. The studio could accommodate about 100 listeners, at 50 cents a pop; the concerts afforded Los Angeles its first hearings of Bartók, Ives, Schoenberg and the growing list of Europeans whom Mr. Hitler had sent to our shores. Yates moved on in the 1960s, and the people who bought the house turned the studio into a rental apartment. When Dorothy Crawford, whose Evenings on and off the Roof tells of the origin of new-music awareness in Los Angeles, asked the then-owners if she could see the house and the studio, she was denied admission.

Now a pleasanter man, named Thom Andersen, owns the house, and with his forbearance the Friends of the Schindler House returned music to the upstairs studio for the first time in over half a century. A fair-sized audience paid a good deal more than 50 cents, but got wine and designer water, plus a little extra entertainment in the form of a highly audible street fair on Sunset Boulevard just below. The local composer Daniel Rothman arranged an evening that included new works for cello by Austrian composers performed by the excellent Michael Moser, and two by America’s own Alvin Lucier, scratched and banged out by the indefatigable Art Jarvinen and yet another cellist, Lynn Angebranndt.

It was, I am sorry to inform you, a rather awful concert, all the worse if – like me and the great Leonard Stein and a few other venerables in the audience – you remembered Peter Yates and his missionary zeal. A half-hour of Jarvinen banging ding-ding-ding on an oversize triangle as the first of the Lucier pieces, and Peter would have put his house on the market a lot sooner than he did. Forty-five minutes of Angebranndt’s raspy electronic cello oozing upward over two octaves in the second Lucier, and Peter would have halved the asking price. The room, its outlines simple, with its sloping roof designed to copy the angle of an open piano lid, seemed to possess remarkable acoustics, but with almost everything coming out of loudspeakers, that really didn’t matter. I want another concert at that house, with the great, substantial music that is still being composed that reflects back on the heritage of Ives and Bartók and Stravinsky and Boulez and Elliott Carter, whose music once thrived in the light of “Roof” and “Monday Evening.” After that, Thom Andersen can have his house back.

There’s nothing wrong with an occasional wallow in the lower depths. I go to Norm’s for lunch now and then; I own two pairs of Doc Martens; I’ve been known to watch a soap or two. But gee whiz, folks, there’s a limit, and a week at the Hollywood Bowl wherein the offerings included Lalo’s turgid, gesturesome Symphonie Espagnole on Tuesday and the spineless First Piano Concerto of Rachmaninoff two days later should, by rights, have pulled down the wrath of the Environmental Protection Agency.

If ever a work, once popular, has outlived its utility, surely Lalo’s tired pastiche of Hispanic phrase turns – with nary a memorable melody to justify its half-hour-plus duration – must be it. Its presence was, I suppose, considered an enhancement to the first of Miguel Harth-Bedoya’s two Latino programs by proving that even French composers can venture past the Pyrenees in search of inspiration. The rest of the program, with music by Ravel and Chabrier, proved that point. The performance of Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole, even through mikes and speakers, came across a glorious wash of color. Christian Tetzlaff, a fine violinist who has given us Beethoven and Berg in previous visits here, played the Lalo – overmiked as if he were offering a batch of show tunes – seemingly unreached by any idea of what he was doing in that piece or that locale. That made two of us.

Impertinent question: Would anyone bother with the Rach 1 if it weren’t for the Rach 2 (and, if you insist, 3)? Here is a straggling, shambling piece of work that can only injure its composer’s reputation by existing. Put it forward, in a land where it is hitherto unknown, as a parody of the bad Rach manner (as with Mozart’s Musical Joke) and you might get somewhere. Young Vardan Mamikonian played a lot of notes, but got nowhere. Harth-Bedoya was again in charge, demonstrating with his slap-’em-silly performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol the superiority of Ravel’s traversal of the same territory.

I like Harth-Bedoya’s work, the quality of his music making and the nice atmosphere he creates around it with his ingratiating (and blessedly to-the-point) spoken intros. He is on a roll lately, as he deserves, with podiums in New Zealand and Texas and guest shots all over the map. I don’t need to spell out his special value to this highly varied community, underscored with the Latino content in his programming (including his next Music Center date in November). I’ll bet he steps outside that frame in Texas and New Zealand, though, and he should do that here as well. (He will, with Dvorák’s Seventh Symphony, next March.)

In Seattle earlier this month there were simultaneous Siegfrieds – one who sang and another who lip-synched. Fafner the Dragon filled the stage, both terrifying and adorable, a velociraptor right out of Jurassic Park. Rhine Maidens cavorted on the flying trapeze, singing all the while. This was the Seattle Opera’s third production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen since 1975, when the company launched its campaign to transform itself into America’s Bayreuth. It comes ever closer. Its main competition this summer has been Seattle’s Mariners, who dominate the percentages like Wotan at Valhalla, and whose tickets are as hard to come by as the Rhine’s Gold.

The Mariners lost the night I went; the Ring, by and large, triumphed. Stephen Wadsworth’s concept was revolutionarily retro, a “return to nature” that even Rousseau might approve. The tall conifers of Thomas Lynch’s Rhineland forest, bearded with moss and in garments green, might have been rooted anywhere in Western Washington; Speight Jenkins, Seattle Opera’s voluble, Texas-born honcho, allowed as how the production neither could nor would ever be borrowed by another company. Revivals are set for 2005, 2009 and 2013; if I know Seattle’s Wagnerites, the box-office lines are already forming.

Wadsworth’s plan of action pretty much followed the book; his Valkyries even sported the old-fashioned winged helmets that you see in all the parodies. One nice touch: Rather than the wholesale burn-up at the end, the curtain fell on a happy family reunion – Wotan and Brünnhilde with the Siegmund family, all smoochy at the bottom of the Rhine. Jane Eaglen, on whose, er, broad shoulders the role of Brünnhilde currently rests in many major houses, became more profound, more thrilling night after night. Stephanie Blythe, a mezzo-soprano of comparable proportion, was a stupendous Fricka. Alan Woodrow, whose Siegfried was to be the summer’s major debut, tore a quadriceps muscle the day before and sang from a stool at the side of the stage, lip-synched – more or less satisfactorily – by the understudy, Richard Berkeley-Steele. (In the two ensuing performances of the cycle, Berkeley-Steele had the role to himself in both sight and sound.) Denmark’s Stephen Milling was the Hunding, a hugely resonant bass; I would kill to hear his Sarastro somewhere, sometime. The dry-voiced Phillip Joll was the inadequate Wotan; as his adversary Alberich, Richard Paul Fink sang with far greater eloquence. Franz Vote’s conducting was, shall we say, okay; I missed having my throat clutched at by Siegmund’s capture of the sword and by the collapse of Valhalla at the end.

Like Bayreuth, Seattle at Ring-time is an object of pilgrimage, of addiction if you prefer. Wagner societies thrive in many cities – there’s one here and another in San Francisco – and their devout members migrate from one shrine to the next. I dined one night with representatives from several branches, and when I confessed that I’d never been to Bayreuth, the reaction was as horrified as when Tannhäuser sings his obscene song at the Wartburg. Wagner T-shirts sell like Freia’s apples at the Opera House’s shop, and some people – not many, I’m happy to say – showed up at performances in Valkyrie helmets and similar gadgetry, as people at rock events sometimes dress as the performers.

Apropos gadgetry: It did no harm that the neighborhood industry, Microsoft, was on hand to help with high-tech lighting and stage-design graphics. It’s interesting, in fact, that after all the recent Ring productions in futuristic, industrial-age or punk-bar settings, contemporary technology has made it possible to return the work to Wagner’s own vision of forests, fairy-tale monsters and winged helmets. George Lucas, already at work on Los Angeles’ upcoming Ring, will probably agree.

A couple of Saturdays ago, several of us, in a corner of the performance space at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, watched as a small spider did what spiders do best. She had anchored her new web between two lightbulbs on an overhead cable. From there she swung down on a strand of web, curving her trajectory to clear the heads of people in the front row, and then made her way back up on another strand, then down again, then up. All the while, the silky moans of Pauline Oliveros’ accordion filled the space with sound, gently guiding the crowd toward an experience of what she calls “deep listening.” Somehow the bond took shape, between the intricate design imposed onto the surrounding air by the spider and her web and by the sounds of Oliveros’ music. Later that evening came another kind of bonding, no less satisfying: Oliveros and shakuhachi player Philip Gelb drawing each other out in over a half-hour of serene improvised “conversation,” full of deep if wordless meanings. By then the spider was lost in darkness, but you could still feel her presence.

Deep Listening: In Oliveros’ world it suggests that charting the course of a classical symphonic movement or a romantic virtuoso exercise, however lavish their rewards, is still the base of the mountain. Up on the slopes are the infinitesimal sounds of spiders at their weaving, the rustlings and breathings in the room around John Cage’s famous “silent” piece, the slow drone of Oliveros’ accordion, tuned to harmonies that break clear of our well-tempered scale. Her instrument engulfs her body as it engulfs our senses; the only picture I can summon up comparable to watching her playing is the memory of Segovia wrapped around his guitar; he, too, could so transport an enthralled audience to the brink of silence, even in the 3,000-seat expanse of Carnegie Hall, as to command a kind of deep listening. Friends who have been there tell me that listening to music in India, where families with small children partake of the experience without abandoning their own sounds and rhythms – so that the world itself creates a part of the experience – also demands a way of listening far different from the artificial attentiveness we sometimes have to manufacture at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. (Please do not, however, take this as extending a welcome to cell phones as a component to the process of listening deeply at the Philharmonic.)

The Schindler House, with its marvelous flow from indoor to outdoor space, generates its own kind of music, and always has; it currently houses the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. In April 1935, the very young John Cage and his mentor, Henry Cowell, presented some Japanese visitors in a concert of gagaku – at that time a most exotic and unfamiliar art – at the House; the venture earned a net profit of $13. Three years later Rudolf Schindler designed a small performance studio on the roof of Peter Yates’ home at 1735 Micheltorena St. in Silver Lake, where Yates – a self-taught aficionado whose adoration of the compositional process shines a bright light in the annals of music consumership – invited musicians to perform new music for select audiences. His concerts, then known as Evenings on the Roof and later renamed the Monday Evening Concerts, still go on (at LACMA) and still challenge. The studio also still exists, and there will be music there – new, of course – this very weekend: two concerts under MAK Center auspices on Saturday, August 18.

Morton Feldman’s music also demands deep listening; the four hours on the edge of silence in his For Philip Guston do not reveal their secrets the first time around. His series of four pieces collectively titled The Viola in My Life provides a more accessible entrée; I would call the last of these – at hand on a new disc on the EMF (Electronic Music Foundation) label – truly beautiful.

The solo viola spins its web: short melodic curves swooping down and up, against bursts of orchestral commentary. I don’t want to belabor the spider analogy, but the sense of dimension in this work, of forces in motion in the near and far distance, and – as in all of Feldman’s work – of the shards of silence alternating with soft, mysterious sounds can hold you spellbound over a 20-minute span (as in this work) or over the four hours of Guston. Feldman’s Instruments II, also on the disc, similarly seeks to weld sounds and silences into a consistent linear experience but does so, to these ears, less successfully. It’s the viola that connects the dots and weaves the exhilaration in the first work – in Feldman’s life and, through him, in ours.

The performances are from David Felder’s excellent June in Buffalo Festival, with Jesse Levine the solo violist and an orchestra assembled from the new-music performing nobility worldwide. Felder, formerly of UC San Diego, has two short pieces on this disc as well – aggressive, intense music that forms glistening, rounded surfaces, where Feldman aims toward flat planes. Heard together, these four works -– the two by Felder interspersed with the two by Feldman – form an absorbing display of great contemporary spirits at work.

For a similar blending of near and far distances, listen to three works by Ingram Marshall on a new Nonesuch disc, Fog Tropes II. Marshall has a fascinating way of reaching out beyond the “normal” musical spectrum; previous works have included the clanking of iron prison doors on Alcatraz Island and the foghorns on San Francisco Bay; the new disc once again mingles the Bay Area’s marine layer into the playing of the Kronos Quartet. I find Marshall’s Kingdom Come even more attractive; into the playing of the American Composers Orchestra Marshall has blended the rough sounds from a taped panorama of folkways: a Croatian church choir in a dirgelike hymn, bells and solo chanting from other churches in the region and an ancient recording of a Bosnian Muslim chant. (The motivation here is the death of a close relative of Marshall’s, killed by a land mine in Bosnia in 1994.)

The element of personal involvement aside, this is powerful, extraordinarily deep-hued music. So is the third work on the disc, Hymnodic Delays, in which members of Paul Hillier’s Theater of Voices sing old American hymn tunes with their singing processed and tape-delayed to create a texture both old and new. This, too, is dark, rather sad music, but the happy overtone here is the presence of a talented American composer constantly in search for new materials, and with a pretty good set of ideas about how to use them.

A superb performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, such as Matthias Bamert led last week at the Hollywood Bowl, carries a huge array of incidental baggage. Like a rhinoceros at a tea party, the Ninth lumbered onto the musical scene in 1824, trampled upon even the most liberal-minded of artistic expectations, sent critics back to their ink pots to rummage for new modes of imprecation and invective. The ink on its first printing was scarcely dry when it reached deeply into the soul of the teenage Richard Wagner, who on his own set about creating a transcription of the work for piano solo – that, in pre-stereo days, being the manner in which a listener at home might make the acquaintance of the repertory. He offered his manuscript to Schott, Beethoven’s publisher, who rejected it but rewarded the young firebrand with a bound copy of another Beethoven score, the Missa Solemnis.

Wagner and the Ninth: This was more than a chance encounter. It was Wagner, above any other figure, who shaped the shadow cast by Beethoven’s unruly masterwork over everything in music after its time. Of all the obsessions that played across Wagner’s fevered brow, his worship of this one work served him the best. Essay after essay poured from his pen; in a vast Dionysian stew the names of Homer, Socrates and Beethoven floated freely. When Wagner’s pen faltered, Friedrich Nietzsche took it up, and added the name of Wagner himself to the mix. The reopening of Wagner’s Bayreuth after WWII was signalized not by a Ring newly staged, but by a consecrational performance of the Beethoven Ninth led by Wilhelm Furtwängler; it’s one of the six performances of the Ninth by that conductor currently available on CD. Note the irony: If the government of Israel were to maintain its absurd proscription of Wagner in its music halls and opera houses with any consistency, the Ninth would be added to the no-no list.

In the public view, the bringing in of voices in the finale – with the tune that every schoolboy now knows – is the work’s major innovation, along with the extended length that this elaborate finale requires. (Be glad, by the way, that Beethoven’s quite-long-enough finale makes do with only three of the eight stanzas in Schiller’s “An die Freude.”) From Mendelssohn to Liszt to Mahler, the notion of a finale with voices as apotheosis to a grand symphonic design became one of the prime romantic gambits. But the very opening of the Ninth was to cast an even longer shadow over succeeding musical structures: The first sounds might be off in some distant cloud, their harmonies purposely undefined, out of which – a veritable thunderclap in Beethoven’s case – a theme takes shape. Think of a century of cloudy, from-out-of-nowhere beginnings: the five minutes of dark swirl of Rhine waters under a sustained, ambiguous single chord that starts Wagner’s Ring; the distant quiver that begins every Bruckner symphony and the Mahler First; Vaughan Williams’ London Symphony; the voice in the wilderness at the start of Le Sacre du Printemps (an ancestry that Stravinsky would vigorously disown).

Given the Bowl’s iffy sound system, and the realities of the one-concert–one-rehearsal scheduling, Bamert, Swiss-born (1942), delivered a Ninth remarkable for its direct, no-nonsense power. (To note that he was for many years assistant to George Szell at the Cleveland Orchestra goes some distance to define his qualities.) His tempos were brisk – probably fairly close to Beethoven’s own famously unworkable metronome markings – but not, for today’s ears, trivializing (as they are in some so-called “historically informed” recordings). He obeyed all of Beethoven’s repeat signs, which Bowl conductors are wont to ignore, and also observed Beethoven’s curious stricture calling for a quick segue from slow movement to finale. Above all I admired the clarity of his performance, the fine balance in the gnarled counterpoints in the first movement and the halo spun by the winds in the slow movement. The chorus – John Alexander’s Pacific Chorale – sang its words cleanly, even passionately; the soloists formed a well-balanced, if somewhat underpowered, vocal quartet.

The night was a triumph for Bamert and, thus, for Beethoven. Two nights later there was more of the same, a Fifth Symphony of similar strength and intensity, and a lovely, warm reading by Andreas Haefliger of the Third Piano Concerto. On Friday, with Eri Klas conducting, the goofier Beethoven came to the fore: the Choral Fantasy and the “Battle” Symphony – the latter with the fireworks that the Bowl does better than any other place around.

What are we supposed to make of that Choral Fantasy? That it was a work hastily composed and hastily rushed into print doesn’t quite explain its awfulness; lesser composers have been known to disown better works. That its principal tune, arrived at after long spells of meaningless noodle-noodle, has something to do with “the” melody in the Ninth is not interesting enough to justify the unconscionable empty spaces in the work both before and after the tune arrives. There is one moment worth noting, however; it anticipates a major event in the Ninth where the chorus screams itself toward a deceptive cadence on “Und der Cherub steht vor Gott!” In the Ninth it happens once, and it’s hair-raising. In the Choral Fantasy it’s just something else that happens, and since it happens twice it becomes meaningless. All the empty piano figuration that starts the work, which Norman Krieger dispatched as well as needed, is supposed to represent Beethoven’s style at improv; apparently it was written down post facto by a student. Beethoven should sue.

But there’s nothing better than the Choral Fantasy to make the “Battle” Symphony, which ensued, resound like a masterpiece. Reportedly the Beethoven work most popular with audiences during his lifetime – and, thus, a cause of untold weeping all the way to the bank – it is at least amusing enough to stand as a paradigm of all the second-rate composing of the time. (Mozart’s Musical Joke served the same purpose, even more hilariously, a quarter-century before.) Actually, there are a few great patches in the work, right at the end as Nelson’s Brits stand triumphant and the strains of “God Save the King” wind through some startling harmonic and contrapuntal challenges. Unfortunately, at the Bowl this came during the climax of those astonishing fireworks, so that the music incurred some competition. I’ll take that over helicopters, however, anytime.

For better or worse, we tend to associate the so-called ”serious“ side of the Hollywood Bowl’s musical smorgasbord (i.e., the ”classical,“ or TuesdayThursday, programming) with a gathering of old friends. A succession of Rachmaninoff toe-tappers with their hit tunes that come and go, a swirl of a Tchaikovsky pas de deux, a tinkle of Ravel and Saint-Saens: All of these will soothe the savage beast without offering any sort of challenge to the attention span. Symphonies lasting an hour or more, you might think, belong in the more lordly air of the Music Center in midwinter. Yet three successive classical programs, last week and this, have been dominated by symphonic behemoths: the Shostakovich 10th, Berlioz‘s ”Fantastique“ and — past deadline, stay tuned — the Beethoven Ninth.

Interesting sidelight: All three works are colored, to some degree at least, with the idea of chaos, a struggle to emerge victorious, and some kind of apotheosis. Beethoven’s triumphant final tune shakes itself free from an orchestral argle-bargle in which three other alternatives are presented and shouted down. Berlioz and his ladylove, unable to achieve earthly consummation, mount their his-and-her broomsticks and ride off toward an infernal eternity. Shostakovich assumes his own identity late in the 10th Symphony and pounds his mortal enemy — the dreaded Stalin — into nothingness. That‘s a lot of dramatic involvement to inflict on a picnicking Bowl audience, but the turnout for Shostakovich and Berlioz was reasonable (something like three Dorothy Chandler Pavilionfuls overall), and the responses were enthusiastic.

I have not always, I confess, approached the Shostakovich 10th Symphony with eager anticipation; last week’s performance, under the excellent young (31) Dutch conductor Lawrence Renes, was ardent and well-paced, and it turned me for once into a believer. Its story is well-known. Shostakovich, again in the doghouse in the late 1940s after his lightweight Ninth Symphony failed to deliver the Stalinist tosh the authorities had been promised, withheld the more substantial and complex 10th, which he knew would incur even greater wrath. In 1953 Stalin lay obligingly dead, and the new symphony, at last out of the closet, celebrated that fact in its final minutes on a note of triumph: the theme of Shostakovich himself out-shouting the menacing Stalin tune. Before that had come nearly an hour of richly scored, spacious, important music. Some of it reworked previous ideas — the eerie stretches in the Sixth Symphony with a single instrument seemingly lost in space, the sweet folksiness of the Ninth. Even with the familiar Bowl acoustical drawbacks, I heard this work as what others have claimed for it: the most consequential of the Shostakovich symphonies, and the one that guides us most closely toward the heartbeat of this fascinating and troubled musician.

Last week the Bowl management, striving intrepidly toward the cutting edge of the arts and the sciences, set up a new visual experiment for one week only: video screens flanking the Bowl structure on both sides, and another pair halfway up the hill to improve the view for the folks in the one-buck seats near the Nebraska border. The onstage goings-on were captured by several cameras beside and behind the performers, plus a few up front. Having smaller screens on the sides, rather than the usual big screen hung at center stage, made not watching somewhat easier — no harder, say, than abstaining from a bowl of potato chips within reach. Ironically, the installation coincided with the institution of an earlier starting time for the classical concerts — 8 o‘clock instead of 8:30 — so that the first half-hour or so was dimmed by conflicting daylight. Questionnaire forms — enhancement? distraction? — were handed out; the ultimate fate of the new system, known as IMAG, rests in the hands of the voting public. (Absentee ballots will not count; you had to be there.)

I vote a qualified negative. On Tuesday night we saw quite a lot of suffering, in the tortured face of violin soloist Kyoko Takezawa, locked in unequal combat with the Tchaikovsky Concerto. On Thursday we were vouchsafed less than 10 seconds to look upon the face of pianist Louis Lortie as he jiggety-jogged through Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini; it would have been worth knowing whether he himself was as wreathed in smiles as was his playing. We did get to watch a lot of his finger work, including a couple of neato montage shots of 20 fingers at work at once. Also on Thursday, the cameras took in an irritating amount of conductor Emmanuel Villaume‘s mugging and arm waving — familiar from the L.A. Opera’s abject La Rondine last year — although his antics produced results in well-balanced performances of Berlioz: the ”Fantastique“ and the ”Royal Hunt and Storm“ music from Les Troyens.

On both nights there was sporadic evidence of properly rehearsed camera cues, but equal evidence of shots taken at random. The sweet face of Tamara Thweatt matched the sweet voice of her piccolo at several junctures in Tuesday‘s Shostakovich. On Thursday we saw the four timpanists in the ”Fantastique“ close up, and Carolyn Hove’s poignant English horn, but not the bass drum and not, in the ”Witches‘ Sabbath,“ the violins playing col legno to depict the rattling of dry bones. Friday night’s event, with the terminally cute, execrably untalented Charlotte Church as soloist with every dimple aglow, had the orchestral sections nicely in focus during Britten‘s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Elsewhere on the program — on the half, that is, that I could bear — the cameras mostly aimed in a hit-or-miss relationship to events in the music. Why, in other words, bother?

I suppose you can say that the video setup underscores the theory that music at the Bowl deserves to be taken seriously, not merely as Muzak for food, wine and cell phones. So does the new series of pre-concert talks (titled ”Backbeat Live“ to contrast with the ”Upbeat Live“ talks at the Music Center), which take place in the Gehry-designed roofed-over picnic space between the museum and the box office — and where there is also a small but good barbecue menu. I detect another irony here, however: Does making a Bowl concert resemble more closely a night at home, with the teevee and the barbie, outweigh the hassle of parking and the guy with the cell phone two seats over? Just asking; I‘ll still take the Bowl.

The big picture-book history of the Hollywood Bowl — Tales of Summer Nights — is full of happy memories. In times long gone there were stage spectacles: A Midsummer Night‘s Dream with Mickey Rooney as Puck, Die Walkure with the Valkyries riding their horses down the surrounding hillsides, a Carmen billed as ”The World’s Greatest Production“ (possibly true). Last week‘s Aida was, alas, none of the above.

The cast, in evening clothes, lined up along the front of the stage. The only authentic touch was the Aida, Alessandra Marc, who is constructed along lines comparable to Egypt’s pyramids. Behind the singers, out of any eye contact with them, John Mauceri conducted the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and the Pacific Chorale. That‘s not the same as saying that he conducted the opera. It’s also not the same as saying that any degree of justice was done to Verdi, who depends not only on good solo singing but on a sizzling sense of ensemble in which all parts make up a splendid whole. It struck me as strange, in fact, that at the Gala Concert for the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame, two nights later, there was quite a good use of live television projection on a big screen above the stage, so that when Marilyn Horne sang ”Over the Rainbow“ — which, so help me, she did — you could hear her resonant tones and watch the tonsils that were producing them.

I don‘t necessarily want to watch tonsils during an opera at the Bowl (or anywhere else). It seems to me, however, that if the management could send out visual thrills with Carmen or Walkure long before the days of the TV camera, it is shortchanging audiences now (at up to $100 a pop on this particular night) with the sad sight of a lot of singers in white tie wandering at loose ends on that big stage with the approximate sounds of grand opera somewhere behind them. Of dynamic balance between solo singers and the forces under Mauceri there was none discernible; it was almost as if every soloist had an individual volume control, with license to twiddle the knobs ad lib. It all turned out to be a good argument for staying at home with the records; it’s bad news when a live performance produces that as its final impression.

The performance itself wasn‘t all that much to sing about, for that matter. The lower voices carried the night: Catherine Keen as a gutsy Amneris, Philip Skinner as the Chief Priest Ramfis, and the veteran Donnie Ray Albert — a splendid Porgy in his day — as Amonasro. Richard Margison, the Radames, maintained an even dynamic level, somewhere between loud and louder, throughout the evening.

Saddest of all was the performance of Alessandra Marc in the title role. Like most people who were blown away by her sheer force — ”volume,“ if you prefer — when she first came on the scene in the mid-’80s, I found her not only exciting but excitingly promising. In New York I heard her in an interesting repertory — the Shostakovich 14th Symphony, for example, and some oddball Richard Strauss operas that nobody else wanted to bother with. Then she seems to have caught the fancy of that coterie of opera-going creeps who yell themselves hoarse over sacred monsters and choose to ignore such minor matters as musicianship. The worst of this, in Marc‘s case, is that at a relatively young 43 she has become the careless — nay, the slovenly — singer that you expect to hear, very far down the line, from aging divas fighting off reality. No major artist, as Marc once was, should have allowed herself the squallings, the lumpy phrasings, the wanderings from pitch that she bestowed on this audience.

From his podium, Mauceri delivered congenial, witty but deadly accurate plot summaries before each act. Alan Chapman delivered more wit and information in the first of the pre-concert talks that are now scheduled before most of the Bowl’s classical programs. Add to this the printed notes by the bright young John Mangum, one of the Philharmonic‘s excellent freelancers. Verdi’s marvelous opera may have suffered in the actuality, but it was, at least, flawlessly documented.

By that curious marketing mumbo jumbo that nobody has ever plausibly explained, the Bowl‘s real opening night came two days later. (You knew it was the real opening because of the great spray of balloons — biodegradable, we were assured — that was released just before the concert.) That, alas, turned out to be the evening’s liveliest event. Emmanuel Krivine conducted, starting with the most ”serious“ performance of Gershwin‘s An American in Paris I’ve ever heard — meticulous but joyless and, despite the music‘s immense fund of invention, more than somewhat dull. The pall was then prolonged as Susanne Mentzer came on to take a misdirected stab at three Gershwin songs. Denyce Graves, who was listed as soloist — and who would have known exactly what to do with these songs — had dropped out for reasons of health. Surely Mentzer, the substitute singer, could have come up with a substitute selection — as she did after intermission with an elegant traversal of Ravel’s Sheherazade songs.

Does this all sound as if I‘ve had a lousy time at the Bowl so far? Maybe so, but not entirely. At the aforementioned Hall of Fame Gala there were pre-fireworks fireworks in a closing set by the indestructible Stevie Wonder. And in the first of the Wednesday-night jazz concerts — another ”opening night,“ you might say — I let myself be introduced to the extraordinary bass playing and band leadership of the Cuba-born, New York–based legendary Cachao, for some 90 minutes’ worth of pure, incendiary musical joy. On such occasions you know what the Bowl stands for in this city. Besides, next week they‘re doing the Beethoven Ninth.

Obiter dictum: For once there is good news from the ailing record industry. The Sony disc of music by Kaija Saariaho, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and with Dawn Upshaw and Gidon Kremer among the soloists, over which I waxed ecstatic some months ago (from the promotional pre-release disc), was then delayed due to copyright disputes concerning the printed text. Those matters have now been settled, and the disc is due in late August.

My first recording of Verdi’s Otello came in a fat album – 20 pounds’ worth of 78-rpm discs. My latest recording comes on a five-inch silver disc weighing less than an ounce. It contains not only the sounds of Verdi’s magnificent score – their clarity and resonance far beyond the reach of engineers in the olden days of the 78 – but the sights of a stunning performance as well. The stupendous opening pages play off in a hurly-burly so realistic as to give you the shivers; it’s only after several replayings that you realize that Otello’s storm-tossed ship comes from stock footage, and that invisible stagehands armed with buckets of water are creating the havoc onshore.

You also realize, perhaps a tad less joyously, that a slight but noticeable gap exists between what you see and what you hear – that the sound of Jon Vickers’ stirring “Esultate” doesn’t exactly match the lip movements of Verdi’s tragic hero onscreen. And then you decide, and hold to that decision over the next two hours or so, that the impact of the performance – Vickers, Peter Glossop’s richly probed Iago, Mirella Freni’s heartbreaking Desdemona and the leadership of Herbert von Karajan both as conductor and director – outweighs by some distance the awareness that the dubious art of the lip-synch still falls somewhere this side of perfection. (The EMI release of the Simon Rattle–led Porgy and Bess, if anyone’s interested, consists of the 1988 audio recording plus a 1992 mime and lip-synch job by mostly – but not entirely – the same cast. Go figure.)

Suddenly there is opera on DVD, and the pickings are already lavish. Some of the current catalog has been reprocessed from the previous laser-disc format of fond memory: Karajan’s Otello on Deutsche Grammophon, for example, and his Don Giovanni on Sony, James Levine’s Ring from the Met (only the Walküre so far, but the rest sure to come), Carlos Kleiber on the Strausses, Ingmar Bergman’s miraculous The Magic Flute. There’s also a lot more. European opera houses and festival managements are far more likely than their American counterparts to sell their wares to television producers. Some smart DVD producers, probably realizing that this new format has zoomed in the American market far beyond laser discs, have cast their nets wide. The German company ArtHaus, distributed here by Naxos, has picked up some worthy material from several festival resources, from lordly Salzburg down to
tiny Ludwigsburg; another label, Image Entertainment (based right up the block in Chatsworth), has also been building an interesting catalog. Most of the performances are recorded live, with a small concomitant glitch here and there, but at least they’re not lip-sunk.

Let’s browse. A recent release from ArtHaus includes three Mozarts in three widely different performance attitudes. From Stuttgart comes The Abduction From the Seraglio in one of those high-concept productions, like the fare at the Long Beach Opera, that either works brilliantly or goes splaat. We start with Belmonte’s first aria, he in Mafioso duds, shadowed by a doppelgänger in similar getup. Then the tattooed and garishly clad Osmin does his number, while pulling from a large chest first a severed head, then another, then several other limbs. Hans Neuenfels is the stage director, famous (I’m told) for innovative stage work; he also has rewritten the dialog. Splaat.

A Così Fan Tutte from Zurich looks a lot more promising. Cecilia Bartoli is the Fiordiligi; in a previous audio recording she’s the Dorabella; her debut at the Met was as Despina. (Surely there exists technology
for an all-Bartoli Così? Splaat.)There is splendid music-making here, under Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s enlivening baton, even on an almost bare and poorly lit stage. But Bartoli’s Fiordiligi is all wrong; the high notes don’t jab against Agnes Baltsa’s mellower Dorabella, and you have to look hard at times to find out who is singing which. One nice touch, however, which most of the DVD operas haven’t gotten around to yet: There’s a 20-minute “behind the scenes” addendum, with Harnoncourt’s wise comments a real bonus.

A Magic Flute from Ludwigsburg, on a tiny stage in a small jewel of a theater, shouldn’t
be as good as it is, but I find it delightful: simple props deployed with great wit, a cast with no spectacular voices but none less than charming, a folk-opera staging in which an element often lost in more deluxe productions is restored. I could not forgo the Bergman version (on Criterion), but I’ll keep this one, too.

More high-concept stuff, both on ArtHaus: Der Freischütz from Hamburg is robbed of all sense by Peter Konwitschny’s staging (modern dress, TV screens, etc.) despite the fine conducting of Ingo Metzmacher and Albert Dohmen’s and Jorma Silvasti’s strong work as villain and hero. A staging of La Damnation de Faust from Salzburg, on the other hand, opens out Berlioz’s uneven oratorio with lighting effects and other splendid diableries, all around the stunning Méphistophélès of Willard White and the demonically inspired conducting of Sylvain Cambreling. Also from Cambreling at Salzburg (but this time on Image) there’s a modern-dress, deliciously askew Rake’s Progress that makes as much sense of Stravinsky’s enigmatic fable as any version I’ve seen. It dates from the summer of 1996, three months before – and, would you believe, even better than – the Sellars/Salonen production in Paris. Dawn Upshaw sang the Anne in both: virtuoso quick-change artistry if ever there was.

Above all, I treasure Carlos Kleiber on the Strausses: Die Fledermaus of Johann; Der Rosenkavalier of Richard – both on DG. Something about this elusive, unique figure bursts right through the video screen; his work in the pit, occasionally glimpsed on the videos, is an act of communication as much as of leadership. Molding a waltz tune by Johann, or the sublime final trio by Richard, he seems to be guiding every one of us – out front, in the pit, on the stage – into a sense of closeness with the music that sets him apart from any other musician I’ve experienced, even the greatest. If this doesn’t make sense, so be it. I was hypnotized once by Kleiber in person; I am hypnotized twice by these discs.

I recognize all the arguments against
scaling the grandeur of opera down to TV-set size. Opera on audio may be an imperfect
commodity, but it leaves room at least for the visual imagination to work, in a way that a close-up of Bartoli’s dimples or Siegmund’s swordplay merely stifles. But then these Kleiber performances come along, or Ingmar Bergman’s little girl held spellbound by The Magic Flute (even in the wrong language), and you give in.

The House of Atreus, immortalized by Sophocles some 2,400 years back, has become a beachfront motel complete with pool, perhaps in latter-day Long Beach. Elektra, her sister Chrysothemis, their mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, have rooms there, in the care of five chamber-maids and their boss. Elektra has it in for Clytemnestra, whom she suspects of having killed her father as he relaxed in his Jacuzzi 10 years before. She has spent those years sulking in her messy bedroom, nuzzling her stuffed Snoopy. Later her long-lost brother, Orestes, turns up, a beach bum. When Orestes’ pal hands him a switchblade, he knows what it‘s for. He goes up to Clytemnestra’s room and exacts filial revenge on both Mom and her paramour. Meanwhile, Chrysothemis, who‘s been cowering in her room with her stuffed panda, has slipped into a baby-blue nightie; when Orestes emerges, his T-shirt a bloody mess, she delivers a sisterly hug and they go off for some post-opera hanky-panky. Elektra, meanwhile, has returned to her room. She crams some stuff (including Snoopy) into a suitcase and strolls off — possibly in search of more close relatives to hate.

Not much of this is in the libretto Hugo von Hofmannsthal furnished Richard Strauss for his Elektra, but — as Roy Rallo’s staging for the Long Beach Opera proved beyond doubt two weeks ago — it should be. (Hofmannsthal, and Sophocles before him, have Elektra dancing herself to death, but I‘ve never understood how a girl healthy enough to handle the vocal lines in the opera could then drop dead, done in by a trashy Viennese waltz celebrating the one happy event that’s come her way in the last 10 years.)

You‘ve heard this from me before, I know, but it happened again: The Long Beach Opera remains the blithest of all local innovative spirits. It put on a terrific Elektra in its splendid home in the Carpenter Center of CSULB. Andreas Mitisek’s pit orchestra may have been on the small side for a Straussian blockbuster, but the playing was resonant and nicely balanced — far better, for example, than the coarse roars and groans at the Music Center‘s recent Tosca. The cast looked great and sounded equally great, with the icy daggers of Susan Marie Pierson’s Elektra pinning the crowd to its collective seats and John Packard‘s remarkably young-sounding Orestes investing that role with a whole ‘nother dimension that aging baritones with other companies seldom attain.

And yes, there were some liberties with the visuals. Overtones of incest and lesbianism, which may or may not be embedded among the howls of the Straussian orchestration, were made specific in Rallo‘s staging; Mama Clytemnestra’s imagined demons were epitomized in her clutched bourbon bottle. That‘s typical Long Beach Opera, after all: high on concept, and realities be damned. It has been that way since 1983, when the company emerged from just another provincial purveyor of Butterflys and Traviatas and started taking chances — daring chances, crackpot chances, but always interesting chances. It serves the local operatic scene as a conscience, the way the New York City Opera served the Met in its early days. And — gas prices or no — its audiences include Los Angeles loyalists as well as proud locals. Settling into the agreeably intimate (1,079-seat) Carpenter Center was a smart move; the hall has good sound and no sightline problems.

Its performing space is, however, small, and demands high imagination. Elektra really banged on those walls. Marsha Ginsberg’s set extended out to the stage apron; the action was all out front: loud in sound and in color range as well. For its two-hour duration, the production screamed forth the notion that opera can‘t get any better. And for those two hours, at least, it might have been right.

In my last column I wrote with high praise about the composer Osvaldo Golijov and his recent oratorio Passion According to St. Mark, one of four large-scale works setting the Gospel retellings of the Passion and Crucifixion, commissioned by the International Bach Academy and performed and recorded in Stuttgart during the summer of 2000, each lasting something close to 90 minutes. The composers were chosen to represent diverse cultures, with the idea that these backgrounds would represent the universality of religious faith. Wolfgang Rihm fashions his setting of the St. Luke Gospel from his German background as a latter-day Bach; Sofia Gubaidulina’s St. John setting is deeply rooted in her Russian Orthodox faith; Golijov‘s work draws upon his own eclectic background — Russian, Jewish, Argentine, sometime minimalist; Tan Dun’s Water Passion After Saint Matthew sets that text — familiar from Bach‘s timeless masterpiece — into an all-inclusive, mystical aura. All four works will be available on disc: Tan Dun’s on Sony, the others on Germany‘s Hanssler. Wolfgang Rihm’s Deus Passus is at hand; the Golijov is due in September.

Rihm, born in 1952, is the least known of the four; the Kronos used to play one of his quartets, and the Arditti has recorded three. The new work is strong and dense, dark and spellbinding, not easy but rewarding listening. As its big choruses unwind, they pass by points of correspondence with Bach‘s great Passion oratorios; the effect is like a heavily clouded sky with intermittent shafts of colored light. The text tells of the Crucifixion in straightforward terms, but Rihm has woven in other poetic material — the medieval “Stabat Mater” poem as well as contemporary words by Paul Celan. Helmuth Rilling, the guiding light behind the Passions project and many other noble achievements in the name and spirit of Bach, conducts his Gachinger Chorus and Bach Collegium; the soloists include the marvelous soprano Juliane Banse, with whom I first fell in love at Rilling’s Oregon Bach Festival last summer.

What do we make of this sudden surge of large-scale choral composition — these oratorios and John Adams‘ El Niño (whose recording, by the way, is also due in September, from Nonesuch)? Perhaps it’s just that composers who want to write serious, original, dramatic music have to stand by helpless while opera houses put on Jake Heggie and Carlisle Floyd. Whatever the reason, we are greatly enriched by this new work of Wolfgang Rihm, and the others on the way. Just pray that the record industry — manufacturing and retail both — holds together long enough to get these treasures onto its shelves, and yours.

The June gloom settled over Ojai for most of the Festival weekend; the skies remained gray, the air downright chilly. What light and heat there was came from the stage, in the usual admirable abundance. Have I ever not had a good time at the Ojai Music Festival? Unimaginable!

This was the 55th running of this festival-like-no-other. The current brave and enterprising honcho, Ernest Fleischmann, expanded the agenda from the customary three days to four, Thursday through Sunday — or five, if you include Dawn Upshaw‘s master class in Santa Barbara the preceding Wednesday. The theme, on the handouts at least, was iden-tified as ”Music of and About the Americas,“ but if that strikes you as any kind of limitation, you don’t know Fleischmann‘s unique gift for stretching definitions beyond reality. France’s Olivier Messiaen figured among the un-Americans crammed into this year‘s rubric, as did Japan’s Toru Takemitsu and, in a brief encore piece, England‘s Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Still, the major energy was generated along the north-south axis. Osvaldo Golijov (GO-lee-ov) was on hand, an ingratiating young chap, Argentine by birth, Jewish by descent, Bostonian by residence. A year ago he set the world abuzz with his Saint Mark Passion, one in a series of settings of passion texts commissioned by the International Bach Academy, performed in Stuttgart and later in Boston, a dazzling, sizzling piece — someone snuck me a tape — mingling baroque and Latino elements. (A recording, on the Hanssler label, is imminent.) At Ojai the Cuarteto Latino Americano played Golijov’s Yiddishbuk, a tense, compact 12 minutes honoring past upholders of the faith, not only with Hebraic laments but with an international tragic outcry, brief and spellbinding; Dawn Upshaw sang an aria from his Saint Mark, to which the same applies. Keep an eye — and an ear — on this Golijov.

The Messaien, if not of America, was at least about: From the Canyons to the Stars, a travelogue piece (with, of course, Messiaen‘s usual gatherings of birds) depicting Utah’s scenic wonders. It‘s basic Messiaen, with heavenly voices grappling for our souls through polytonal pileups while a hearer’s posterior is sorely tried over some 100 minutes on Ojai‘s unforgiving benches. British pianist Paul Crossley made his contribution to the general clatter, as did Esa-Pekka Salonen and his hardy band. But Salonen’s real lollapalooza came a night later, a romp through Silvestre Revueltas‘ La Noche de las Mayas to speed the homeward-bound exhilarated in spirit if rattled in every bone.

Upshaw’s all-American song recital included familiar fare (John Harbison‘s Mirabai Songs, which she virtually owns), a nice sampling of new songs by younger composers (Michael Torke, John Musto, etc.) and two extraordinary pieces by Ruth Crawford Seeger, who moves ever so slowly toward deserved acclaim as one of her country’s great composers at midcentury. On the orchestral concert, Upshaw sang the Golijov, a harrowing aria from John Adams‘ El Niño and a haunting short prayer by Cuba’s Tania Leon. Her command of vocal color, from one occasion to the other, is one of her great skills: her girlish, slangy delivery of a Charles Ives conceit in her recital one night, her horror-stricken account of innocents massacred (in Bethlehem, in Mexico City) in the Adams excerpt two nights later.

The Sunday-morning pop or jazz concerts, abandoned in recent years, were reinstated. First I thought of not going to this ”Tribute to Antonio Carlos Jobim,“ then I thought of not wanting it to end. The great guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves was the star, surrounded by a small combo that included an enchanting wisp of a singer, Gretchen Parlato, and a wonderful in-your-face violinist, Karen Briggs. The music rolled, rollicked and exulted; ”The Girl From Ipanema“ was notable only in its absence. A power failure midway through the program (eventually mended) would surely have elicited boos and ill will at a symphony concert or opera; this time it generated a jovial social event. Such was the power of this music.

At the Los Angeles Opera‘s Tosca I prayed for a power failure; the evening was beset by failures equally drastic. Four times now this befuddlement of a production — John Gunter’s claustrophobic and wobbly sets, Liz da Costa‘s costumes that update the action by a century despite textual references to historic events — has been sprung on a hapless public. Ian Judge, who created the production in 1989, has returned to restage it, and delivers a couple of pretty good wrestling matches — Tosca and Cavaradossi in the first act, Tosca and Scarpia in the second. Maria Ewing had been the Tosca the first two times out; Placido Domingo was her Cavaradossi in 1992; they are missed. Neither the Tosca of Carol Vaness (in 1996) nor that of Catherine Malfitano (currently) gives off anything like the trapped, desperate lyricism that can make the role work. Both Malfitano, who at least looks terrific, and Richard Leech, who doesn’t (a sad comedown from Domingo), labor under the delusion that loud equals passionate, which is not quite true. Tom Fox, the current Scarpia, projects none of the penny-dreadful malice that I remember from Justino Diaz, even with his aging voice, in 1996; Fox, more than anyone, is betrayed by the bland suavity of his Edwardian costume. Everything, furthermore, rides on Richard Buckley‘s drab, murky musical leadership, and the ride is — shall we say — bumpy.

Over last weekend the center of operatic gravity shifted south to Long Beach, with a brave but lamebrained double bill by the newly formed Downtown Opera at the tiny Edison Theater, followed two days later by the L.B. Opera’s Elektra — better than you‘re prepared to believe, not to be missed — at the Carpenter Center. (More on that in our next visit.) Martin Herman conducted both short operas at the Edison and composed one of them; you may remember, probably with a shudder, his The Scarlet Letter at Carpenter some years ago. Orlando, his latest, is similarly insipid, trick-laden — Virginia Woolf’s characters tromping around shooting off Polaroid cameras — and marginally appealing for the singing of Jacqueline Bobak in the title role. Sharing the bill — which, like Elektra, runs through this weekend — is William Houston‘s Consumer’s Paradise, five minutes‘ worth of skit about brand-name hang-ups and the passion to possess, unconscionably stretched to an hour’s agony, with music that sounds as if squeezed from a toothpaste tube. Near the end the cast joins in a litany, ”vacuity, perpetuity“; this could be the first-ever opera to include its own review.

Who would have believed it? On February 29, 1988, England’s Arditti Quartet played its usual killer new-music program in its first-ever Los Angeles concert, and lured a gathering of some 20 people to LACMA‘s Bing Theater. Last week the Arditti’s program, even more challenging if anything, filled LACMA‘s plaza with something closer to 300 hopeful ticket buyers, swamping the box-office staff and forcing a half-hour delay in starting the concert. Tell me, therefore, about no audiences for challenging cultural fare.

The concert itself was extraordinary, most of all in the 35 minutes of the mystical near silences of Luigi Nono’s Fragmenti Stille that seemed to transfigure the very air in the hall. The double-bass wizard Stefano Scodanibbio — who had drawn a substantial crowd with his solo recital at LACMA the week before — joined the Ardittis in the final work, Julio Estrada‘s bouncy mix of sophisticated and aboriginal with an unpronounceable name. Then we all jammed into the Bing’s lobby for wine and wonderment at hardcore music‘s ongoing power to pull in a crowd, even on a Monday of a holiday weekend.

My ticket box is now empty, which is one way of determining that the ”season“ is nearly over. (Not quite over, however; there remain Ojai and Tosca — an unlikely mix — to report on next week, and not-to-be-missed opera in Long Beach a week later.) The merry month of May this year has been phenomenal: not the usual subsidence of activity, but a pileup of attractions that left us overworked journalists with agonizing choices between competing events on several nights. How could it happen, for example, that world-class tributes to two major, if unalike, American innovators — David Tudor, Harry Partch — could nudge one another merely a week apart? That two of the world’s most treasurable pianists should turn up at the Philharmonic in the same month — Stephen Kovacevich at the start, Mitsuko Uchida at the end?

Uchida played the first and least-known of Bartok‘s three concertos, an early and formative work full of flexing of muscles if not the richness of the later composer. Never mind; Uchida wrapped into her music making — Bartok or even just C-major scales — becomes an emanation, a magnetic presence; the give and take with Salonen added to the magic. The program went on to murkier matters, a suite from Hans Werner Henze’s Undine, leaving questions as to who dragged this sorry item — egregiously lacking in the snap and sizzle of the composer‘s better works — onto a program otherwise so rewarding. There were further rewards in Ravel’s well-worn Daphnis et Chloe, nicely set forth under Salonen and gorgeously delivered by the orchestra.

There was another Philharmonic program after this — the worst by far of the Rach concertos (No. 4), the shrill awfulness of Scriabin aflame, and some pop Rimsky. If you had heard that Daphnis, however, you‘d understand why I was happy to let the season end right there.

It was, all told, a superior musical season, particularly ennobled by the sense of nostalgia, as if the area’s musical presenters had come to a realization that this state and this nation possessed a history that was now ripe for recognition. The Aaron Copland centennial was nicely attended to, with a chamber-music program at LACMA from New York‘s Copland House, and, better yet, with an imaginative venture into orchestral and film music by the Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesa. At LACMA there was also an excellent series of ”made in California“ programs, celebrating the emigres that fed off the movie industry down here, and the electronic experimenters of San Francisco’s Tape Music Center: a better representation, in fact, of the vitality and variety of California at midcentury than the companion visual exhibition elsewhere in the museum. Attention was finally paid to one living legend, Lou Harrison, with major works at Philharmonic, LACMA and Green Umbrella events. I guess you could also call the Philharmonic‘s John Adams program a ”nostalgia“ event, with a revival of an hour’s worth — not nearly enough — of his breakthrough stage masterpiece, now 14 years old, Nixon in China.

That work, at least, still teemed with vital juices. Not so the season‘s most touted premiere, the Fifth Symphony of Philip Glass, which made it to Orange County on wings of critical ecstasy and reports of Salzburg audiences virtually on their knees — a portentous tosh of protracted empty gesture, above all dull to the point of wrenching cruelty. A far more hopeful sign of music’s ongoing power to reach and uplift, if on a far more modest scale, was Opera Pacific‘s end-of-season importation (from the Houston Opera) of the enchanting, intimate opera that Mark Adamo fashioned from the evergreen novel Little Women.

These things I can still remember at season’s end: spellbinding Wagner from Placido Domingo and Valery Gergiev, not so much on purely musical grounds as for the promise it embodied of the L.A. Opera‘s musical future; that company’s spectacular stagings of Britten‘s Peter Grimes and Handel’s Giulio Cesare, both productions brought in from somewhere else but serving to extend operatic horizons here at home; the voice of Elizabeth Futral and the dazzling thrust of Bejun Mehta in the Handel opera; the radiance of Ian Bostridge‘s immensely likable, intelligent singing in an art-song program in Costa Mesa; Britten’s War Requiem at the Music Center; and — even better — Vaughan Williams‘ On Wenlock Edge, a work I had never expected to like, at the Philharmonic’s Chamber Music Society.

More pianists: the spectacular Marino Formenti, brought back to LACMA for three killer new-music adventures; Murray Perahia, conducting and performing Bach and Mozart, with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, at Cerritos; Andras Schiff, conducting and performing Bach and Beethoven, with the Philharmonic; two spectacular, virtuosic newcomers onto the fingerbustin‘ scene: Arcadi Volodos at the Music Center, Lang Lang (all of 18) at Schoenberg Hall.

And yet . . . the Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra dropped its last two programs; in San Francisco, the Women’s Philharmonic has canceled its next season. Beyond all the brightness, the clouds gather.