So I've Heard

Toward the end of a recent symposium celebrating hardcore musical creativity, someone asked what seemed to be a sensible and important question: How can a listener, confronted with an abstruse piece of new music, recognize what‘s going on? How do we,in other words, determine from our ears’ evidence whether this is a piece of chance composition, an open-form work, 12-tone or, for that matter, a latter-day update of one of the time-honored classical forms?

Nobody had an answer. Nobody, in that distinguished aggregation of composers, scholars, educators, electronic aficionados and a critic or two — gathered together under the auspices of the Getty Institute and CalArts to celebrate the legacy of the legendary pianistcomposerguru David Tudor on the occasion of the Getty‘s acquiring Tudor’s archives — seemed to attach much importance to whether the music and musicianship under examination was ever intended to be received, understood and welcomed into the worldwide repertory of masterpieces. Those works in that repertory, from the past or even the recent present, survive on an audience‘s ability to recognize their mix of inspiration and process: not only the beauty of the theme of Bach’s ”Goldberg“ Variations, say, but the adventures that theme undergoes; not only the shape of the tone row in Schoenberg‘s Fourth String Quartet, but the power of its unfolding. Sometimes it takes a generation or two for the world to catch up with the works of a particular creative genius, but it eventually happens. At the Getty I was assaulted and appalled by Tudor’s 29-year-old electronic work called (or uncalled) Untitled. What disturbed me wasn‘t just the aggressive ugliness of the piece; in my line I encounter plenty of that. What disturbed me more was that the work — whose 20 minutes could have been 20 hours — seemed to be only about itself, closed off and impenetrable.

There’s an irony here, because, a couple of nights before at CalArts, there was another Tudor creation from about the same time that was most of all about reaching and involving an audience. Rainforest IV invites the crowd to wander through a roomful of gadgetry — an old car door, a sculpture of toilet floats, an inverted barrel, you name it, all wired and vibrating, all adding up to a three-dimensional experience exhilarating in its own wacko way. Here, too, was a creation that was basically about itself, but with the extra dimension of sharing that was denied to the beset audience sitting still in the Getty‘s darkened auditorium. The Getty concert — Tudor and his orbit, including John Cage and Morton Feldman — had its moments, however, above all Vicki Ray’s exquisite reading of some of Feldman‘s small piano works. Here there was sharing, inviting a listener to lean toward the music to savor every near-silent detail, as we do with the ”Goldbergs“ and with Schoenberg’s Fourth Quartet.

You couldn‘t name two American originals further apart in style and outlook than Tudor and Harry Partch, yet within 10 days both were handsomely celebrated in local halls: Tudor for his archives, Partch for the upcoming centennial of his birth (June 24, 1901). Over 12 hours last Saturday at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall there was Partch on film, Partch in photographs on walls, Partch manuscripts (extraordinary, the elegance and exactitude of his notation, of music that strayed so enchantingly beyond the limitations of mere written notes!) and, finally, Partch‘s music on the stage. John Schneider — guitarist, composer, baritone, microtonal guru (and host of KPFK’s Global Village) — put together a concert mostly of works Partch composed early on for himself to, er, sing, and delivered a pretty good facsimile of the old boy‘s stentorian growl. Some of Partch’s instruments were on hand: originals, re-creations and, in one case, a keyboard programmed to reproduce the 43-tone scale of the original Chromelodeon; the performers, members of Schneider‘s ”Just Strings,“ managed their exotic gadgetry with appealing skill. On video there was larger, later Partch as well: the dance piece Delusion of the Fury and Betty Freeman’s short documentary on The Dreamer That Remains. Arriving home, I played something in C major, and it was startling.

Nobody cared more than Partch about reaching an audience. In Freeman‘s film he talks about the need for his players to look good — ”not like a bunch of California prune pickers“ — and move well on the stage. At the afternoon’s symposium there was talk of producing more copies of the instruments Partch himself designed and built to manage his one-man tuning revolution — whose originals are now in the care of composer Dean Drummond in New Jersey — to enable more widespread hearings of the music. That is certainly preferable to recent attempts to hand the works over to ”normal“ players, as a recent stab at Partch‘s Barstow by Philharmonic players at a ”Green Umbrella“ concert (even with Schneider’s recitation) sadly proved.

Yet there is a dead end here, similar to what I sensed at some of the Tudor discussions. The music Partch wrote for his strange and fascinating array of instruments — some two dozen, originally — stands as the audible emanation of one whole ornery, cantankerous, innovative spirit. The instruments provide the visible counterpart. Nobody else in his right mind could compose for these instruments without cloning that whole spirit. As long as there are John Schneiders to re-create passably the sounds of Partch — like all those jazz bands around claiming to rekindle the sounds of Ellington — we‘ll have a tenuous grip on this unique byway in the annals of American innovation. But Partch remains inimitable, in both the best and the worst sense.

Betty Freeman remains inimitable, too: a sublime local spirit whose money has gone to making new music happen — from a list of beneficiaries that includes such names as Harry Partch and John Cage, Philip Glass and John Adams, Virgil Thomson and practically anyone else who matters in new-music circles. At her insistence, there is no Betty Freeman Concert Hall, no endowed front-row seat at the Music Center, no bronze plaques or banners. Still, she couldn’t prevent Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonic from a weekend of short tributes on the eve of her 80th birthday: a new piano piece by Harrison Birtwistle that Mitsuko Uchida performed on one night, a jolly short orchestral zoom by Salonen on another, and a ”Song for Betty“ by Kaija Saariaho on the third, music eminently deserving of a place among the evidence that serious new music can still break hearts with its pure, simple beauty.

Before there was Scrabble, there was the string quartet. The dinner dishes were cleared, and the company retired to the music room to try out the latest chamber-music delectation from the busy presses in Berlin, Vienna or Paris. Music for four — the “Divertimento a Quattro,” as it was first called — was the medium of choice: two violins to sing the main melodies in sweet harmonies, or to argue them in polite counterpoint; the viola to inject a soberer tone; the cello to supply a firm foundation. In or around 1760, the young provincial composer Joseph Haydn, shortly before assuming the position at the Esterhazy palace that would keep him busy for most of his lifetime, knocked out a set of compositions for the summer quartet parties of the Viennese aristocrat Baron Furnberg. They were admired and published as his opuses 1 and 2. Over the next four decades their numbers would grow; more than any other medium in which he worked with astonishing prodigality, Haydn‘s 68 quartets represent a compelling document: of his own growth as a composer, of the growth and enrichment of the musical language we know — not entirely accurately — as “classical,” and of the taste and wisdom of a musical public that could recognize and support Haydn’s unique genius.

Working your way through the 21 discs that contain this legacy on a treasurable new Philips release, you can‘t miss that sense of unfolding, in Haydn’s own abilities and also in the world around him. Prince Esterhazy furnished him with a superlative orchestra, affording Haydn the chance to use its individual members as a laboratory for his own progressive ideas. Beyond that, the prince himself and his entourage became for Haydn the kind of audience today‘s composer would kill for: receptive to experiments and to attempts to expand the boundaries of the established musical forms of the time.

The quartets of his first decade at Esterhazy, published as opuses 9, 17 and 20 — with six quartets in each opus — celebrate that growth in 18 daring forward steps. The four voices take on a distinctive personality; the cello is no longer merely the oompah support, but contributes its own voice. Several of the Opus 20 works end with fugues, intense and passionate, far removed from the earlier sense of “Divertimento a Quattro.” Opus 20 No. 5, in the stark, rarely used key of F minor, ends with a fugue subject that would later turn up as the “Kyrie” in Mozart’s Requiem.

The strength grows; so does the mix of daring progressiveness and superb entertainment in these works. Haydn himself described his Opus 33 quartets as composed in “a completely new and special way,” and that can mean any number of things. These were the six quartets that Mozart claimed as inspiration for his own great set that he dedicated to Haydn; for both sublime composers, they served as a declaration of principle, the right of the genius to experiment and to get away with it. The second in Haydn‘s series has come to be known as “The Joke,” for reasons clear to anyone who has applauded prematurely in the trick silences near the end; the third is “The Bird,” for reasons set forth in the enchanting twittering at the start. Not all, however, is airy persiflage; the first in the Opus 33 series, in the passionate key of B minor, uneasily compresses a tense and personal outcry no less dramatic for its lack of words.

An even greater work among these “middle period” quartets, although not as well-known, is Opus 54 No. 2, music in which everything goes against the formulas of the time in the creation of its own new rules. The slow movement is like nothing else in chamber music of any time: a passionate, rhapsodic solo for the first violin — a reflection, perhaps, of Haydn’s own part-Gypsy heritage — that floats like gusts of steam over a somber landscape. Then comes the minuet, hardly an elegant dance this time, with its crashing, dissonant outcries. And then the finale: not the expected, rollicking rondo but another slow movement, its profound melody briefly interrupted by a skittering intrusion but ending in a vision of infinite, starlit heavens.

The best known of the quartets are the six of Opus 76. They come late in Haydn‘s life, after the two trips to London, after the last of the symphonies. They share much of the eloquence of the orchestral works. The slow movement of No. 5 is again in one of the “difficult” keys — F-sharp major, six sharps — which in Haydn always implies a special profundity; its power to stop the breath links it, perhaps, to its counterpart in the Symphony No. 98. The slow movement of the last of Opus 76 is possibly the most amazing of all. It is, again, in a rare tonality — B major, five sharps — but its harmonic wanderings, chromatic and capricious, are so complex that Haydn withholds a key signature until the end, when the music comes to rest in a final burst of pride in its own power to surprise and delight.

The new recording crowns our own Angeles String Quartet’s Haydn project, which has been taking shape in a concert series at LACMA over the past several years, with one personnel change along the way — second violinist Sara Parkins replacing Steven Miller in 16 of the works. The set lists for $142, although I‘ve seen it online for $126; since the one competition, the Naxos set by the Kodaly Quartet — which also includes Haydn’s quartet version of The Seven Last Words of Christ — lists for $120, the price differential is relatively minor. The Angeles performances are suave, beautifully thought out and altogether creditable, although I do admire the extra intensity of the Kodaly‘s Attila Falvay in rhapsodic passages such as the aforementioned 542. At a time when concern is rising over the future, if any, of serious classical recording, the appearance of this altogether distinguished venture comes as momentary solace.

Obiter dictum: There is less solace, however, in a recent note from Sony. The disc of the music of Kaija Saariaho — conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen with Dawn Upshaw and Gidon Kremer among the soloists — which I reviewed with some ecstasy a few weeks ago to coincide with the announced release date, has now been “indefinitely withheld” from its U.S. release. The reasons, a Sony rep informs me, consist of “problems still to be resolved.” I reviewed the disc from the usual pre-release copy sent to all the press at least two months before I wrote; it’s hard to believe in “problems” showing up this late — especially given the full-page ads for the disc in British journals — except for possible problems among Sony executives concerning serious and challenging new music. To those hopeful buyers — quite a few, I‘m told — who have searched in vain for this marvelous disc, my sympathies: temporary, I hope, but don’t hang by your thumbs.

Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto is so immediately lovable that we can forget what an original and important work it really is. It can bring out the best in a performer, as it did for Sarah Chang in her Philharmonic appearance last week. It can also bring out the worst, as it did for Bulldozer Nadja at the Bowl a couple of summers ago, a performance I wish I could get out of my head.

For its time – 1844, three years before the composer’s death – it was a new kind of concerto. Rather than the customary long orchestral preamble, its soloist enters immediately to tell us the matter at hand, a matter of great intensity but set into a shapely frame – not a note too many, nor a gesture wasted. Beethoven had allowed his soloist an early entry in his last two piano concertos, but only as a quick-tease preview. Mendelssohn’s soloist comes at us from center stage. All kind of things happen in the work that hadn’t happened in concertos before – not, at least, in
any music worth preserving. The cadenza comes in the “wrong” place, at the moment of highest tension in the dramatic plan rather than, as in Mozart or Beethoven, in the peroration. There is no break between movements; the mark of a good performance, in fact, is the successful transit over the flimsy bridge that connects the first and second movements – a single held note on the bassoon – without audience reaction beyond the proper silent awe. (That almost happened at the Music Center on Thursday, as a single “brava” got choked off in midsyllable.)

Mendelssohn’s place in the pantheon isn’t easily assessed. His legacy is studded with serene and novel almost-masterworks of high order -– the Octet and Midsummer Night’s Dream music from his teens, this concerto and the “Scottish” Symphony from his 30s, remarkable patches in between. At LACMA, the night before the Philharmonic concert, the Angeles String Quartet performed the D-major Quartet (Opus 44 No. 1) from six years before the concerto, music of considerable energy but also hobbled by contrapuntal churning and by an amount of clumsy tune spinning that you don’t usually expect from that airborne pen. The counterpoint in the Violin Concerto is wonderful stuff – for one instance, the gorgeous free-flying tune that floats over the giggling main theme of the finale. We hear it as the magic nobody else could (or, at least, did) create. Measure that, however, against the vast exercises in turgid contrapuntal writing
in the oratorios and even in some of the chamber pieces, and you wonder if all of Mendelssohn’s noble work in restoring Bach’s St. Matthew Passion rubbed off on his own music the wrong way.

(More about the Angeles Quartet anon; I am spending this week in the company of their new recording of all of Haydn’s string quartets – 21 discs on Philips. I’ll report next week, if I get back to Earth in time.)

The Philharmonic’s program was actually a celebration of Joaquin Rodrigo’s centenary, with Mendelssohn’s concerto stuck in as leavening – a welcome alternative to the more obvious but far less worthy choice, Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole. There was a relationship here that the more demented observer might notice. Rodrigo, too, lives on through a clutch
of attractive and elegant (neo-Mendelssohnian, perhaps?) concertos, most but not all for guitar, which aspire to a favored place in the repertory – and, apparently, a fair amount of stuff of lesser appeal. The works on last week’s program, which received lively, careful and loving performances under Miguel Harth-Bedoya, were in the latter enclave: three pieces for large orchestra composed between 1923 and 1978, including one about Don Quixote’s Dulcinea that called for voices, all of it well-wrought without very much distinction in tone – or, for that matter, traits of style identifiable as Rodrigo or any other of
his compatriots. The composer’s daughter Cecilia lent a charming presence to the pre-concert talk, but didn’t cast further light on why this should all be taking place.

Mark Adamo’s Little Women runs at the Irvine Barclay Theater through May 20, brought here by Opera Pacific in the work’s acclaimed first production by the Houston Opera Studio. I urge you to see it, to assure yourself that beautifully proportioned small-scale American opera can still work if serious intelligences are involved. Adamo did his own libretto, and set it to vital, shapely music that, for once in the troubled annals of new opera, doesn’t sound cribbed from half a dozen soundtracks. Not having made my way through Louisa May Alcott’s enduring novel at any time in recent decades, I still get from this lithe and enormously attractive stage work a sense of closeness to the interlock of personalities that I missed in, for example, the recent Winona Ryder film. Adamo writes arias, lots of them, and they really identify the people singing them. Better yet, he writes ensemble pieces with genuine operatic counterpoint. In this he is aided by Peter Webster’s stage direction, which places characters in dramatic contrast, in and out of time and focus, on Christopher McCollum’s wonderfully cluttered, multilevel stage set.

The cast, mostly young and not yet well-known, couldn’t be better: a strong, frazzled Jo from Kirsten Chávez played off against the fragile, vulnerable Laurie of Jeffrey Lentz; Katherine Ciesinski’s glorious harridan of an Aunt March; Christina
Suh, Natalie Taormina and Stephanie Woodling as the other March sisters; Andrew Fernando as Friedrich Bhaer, scene-stealing with high bravado in his rendition of a Goethe ballad. Christopher Larkin, who conducted the Houston performances, does so again. His orchestra is small: 11 strings, single winds; it’s all you need to project this rich, pliant score.

For a first opera, by a composer still in his 30s, I would reckon Little Women a happy, even astonishing success. Its presence here is the first entry in Opera Pacific’s new program highlighting recent American operas. Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking
is the announced second entry. You can’t win ’em all.

I would like to live long enough to see this happen: A pianist’s recital ends with Opus 111, the last of Beethoven‘s 32 sonatas; as its final cadence — music touched by an angel — merges into the surrounding silence, the audience shares that silence for some minutes and then, in silence, leaves the hall. As often as I’ve wanted this to happen — after performances by Schnabel, Pollini, Brendel and a few others in the galaxy — it never has; sooner or later some undeserving helot out front, endowed with itchy palms, assumes the right to break the spell and open the floodgates. That happened again the other night at the end of Stephen Kovacevich‘s all-Beethoven recital at the Music Center, after a performance as close enough as never mind to meriting membership in that galaxy.

Scholars, program-note writers, even novelists, have haggled for years about Opus 111, specifically about why Beethoven cut off the work at the knees after only two movements. (The other two-movement sonatas among the ”32“ are of slighter substance.) Simultaneously hard at work on the Ninth Symphony, he is supposed to have snapped ”I don’t have the time“ to his friend Anton Schindler — who then, naturally, bestowed immortality upon the remark by including it in his Beethoven biography. Some of the most turgid pages in Thomas Mann‘s Doctor Faustus describe the struggles of the pedant Kretschmar to ”explain“ Beethoven’s decision.

There is no more convincing explanation, however, than the one Beethoven has provided in the music itself — in, for that matter, just the final three notes of its 18-or-so-minute second movement. The kernel of this movement is a three-note figure, heard at the outset and then built upon, a questioning motif whose answer will be long withheld. The music blossoms outward in many ways: first in a series of variations which become so complex that the printed page turns black from the abundance of notes; then in a recession toward barrenness, to a point where right and left hands play one-finger tunes at opposite ends of the keyboard. At no point in this progression is there any real ”answer“ to that three-note ”question“ — until, that is, the closing bar, soft and sunlit, where a perfect C-major cadence, again a single breath of but three notes, fulfills the music‘s long-unanswered question and moves us onto some other plane. Neither applause nor further music is the logical consequence of such an ending. Neither Beethoven nor Kovacevich could control the former; Beethoven controlled the latter in the best way possible. (Kovacevich did reward his ovation with one assuaging Beethoven Bagatelle, but only after the tumult had fully destroyed the serenity of the preceding moments.)

Kovacevich is part of that other galaxy, along with Murray Perahia and Richard Goode: American pianists on one or the other side of 60, brainy, dedicated and admirably resistant to notions of quick crowd wooing via Rach 3 and Mussorgsky. As a cocky teenager in Berkeley, he told me of his planned stairway to eminence through studies with the formidable Myra Hess; I advised him not to quit his day job, or words to that effect. Now he’s exactly where he planned to be (and neither of us has a day job).

His Beethoven program last week was full of interesting correspondences. As in Opus 111, the last movement of Opus 101 builds a rich and varied structure — angular and sharp-edged rather than seraphic and serene — out of a tiny fragment of a theme (only two notes, this time). In both works you are held in a tension that borders on agony as the music unfolds. In both works the final resolution carries you to a state close to ecstasy. You have to wonder at the composer‘s control over his inner demons — with a body in which deafness was probably the least painful of his chronic afflictions — that could produce the sublime substance of such music and, even more, the shaping of that substance into the vast time structures that hold us all in its grip. The truly brainy among pianists know to penetrate the notes of this music and also the spirit behind them; this is what I heard from Kovacevich the other night, to his credit and my pleasure.

By coincidence or design, last week’s Philharmonic program included two great works also cut off at the knees. The first was the two surviving movements — miraculous in every bar — of the B-minor Symphony that Schubert abandoned short of completion, for reasons we will never understand. The other was the tense and disturbing Adagio completed by Gustav Mahler for a projected 10th Symphony that he did not live to finish. (The entire work, completed by other hands from surviving sketches, was performed by the Philharmonic earlier this season, conducted by James DePriest.) In between came more of Kovacevich‘s Beethoven, a spirited tear through the early C-major Piano Concerto.

Heinrich Schiff was on the podium: extraordinary cellist, extraordinary conductor. (I had missed his cello concertos the week before. Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony was also on that program, a work that — after 57 years of professional writing — I have earned the right to abjure.) His conducting of Schubert and Mahler had a cellist‘s touch, the remarkable warmth of tone that came from a fine control over balance. The tunes in the ”Unfinished“ are so captivating that we can overlook another of the work’s compelling qualities: the scoring, most of all the romantic use of trombones that Schubert can be said to have invented — in this work, the Rosamunde music and the Ninth Symphony.

The ”Unfinished“ is one of those works easily dismissed with an ”oh no, not that again“ shrug, until an exceptional performance grabs us by the ears and obliges our rediscovery. From the opening whisper of the cellos (even though joined on Friday — aaargh! — by the electronic squeal of cell phone or hearing aid that blights our concert life nowadays) it was obvious that Schiff and the orchestra had something new to tell us about this work –and, therefore, that Schubert did, too.

You could write a history of musical consumerism around the varied positions that Bach‘s St. Matthew Passion has held on the scene in the quarter-millennium of its existence. You start with the century of neglect, then the rediscovery and reconstruction in the squishy harmonies to endow the work with proper Victorian manners. Then came the further inflation to college-glee-club proportions, then the purification back to the ”what the composer might have heard“ proportions in the 1950s’ ”authenticity“ groundswell. These many sizes are all — or at least once were — available on recordings. In my days as a schoolboy collector, the one available St. Matthew seemed to suffice, the glee-club-size English-language mayhem wrought by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony on 27 — count ‘em — 78-rpm discs. Now, in this era of ludicrous overabundance, I’ve received three new versions just in the last few months.

One of these is by Helmuth Rilling, who as head of the International Bach Academy in Stuttgart is overseeing the complete 172-disc Bach project on Hanssler and who conducted the work with the Philharmonic and assembled vocal forces here last week. I am one of Rilling‘s staunch admirers — defenders, even, when necessary — whose praises I have often sung after performances here and at the Oregon Bach Festival. I would describe his Bach as middle-of-the-road modern. His forces at the Music Center were larger than the authenticity nuts might countenance: the 75 or so members of the USC Thornton Choral Artists plus the 29 boys and (horror!) girls of the Paulist Choristers of California; the Philharmonic players in similar numbers. He did not hesitate to add an occasional expressive ritard at the end of arias and chorales. Matthias Goerne, who delivered the words of Jesus, was allowed enough vibrato to transmute his singing into pure heartbreak. So was the orchestra’s concertmaster, Martin Chalifour, whose solo violin around Ingeborg Danz‘s ”Erbarme dich“ haunts me still. So was the tenor Christopher Cock, a last-minute replacement, who sang the narration as a disembodied onlooking angel — inauthentically, perhaps, but to extraordinary effect.

Even within the secular confines of Mrs. Chandler’s Pavilion, with the outside bustle clearly audible and the extra music from the disc peddlers during intermission — am I the only one who finds this an intrusion? — the work made its impact, the Hand of God in every glorious detail.

In one of those coincidences that keep the planning of this column from ever turning routine, there were other forces at work at USC last week to provide other music that told a similar story and with similar impact. Francis Poulenc‘s Dialogues of the Carmelites retells the Passion and Crucifixion in another but comparable setting: the murder by guillotine of Carmelite nuns clinging to their faith during France’s Reign of Terror. Poulenc‘s opera, which dates from the 1950s, is quiet on its surface but turbulent within, its disturbance captured in the swirl of half-tinted harmonies.

It was an act of bravery for USC’s Thornton Opera Workshop to take on this work — not for the first time, by the way. Timothy Lindberg‘s not-bad orchestra fared reasonably well with Poulenc’s pastels; Nicola Bowie‘s directorial hand moved the action convincingly, and there were a few voices that I will gladly hear again when some more seasoning has set in. The only thing wrong, in fact, was the English translation, which was extremely wrong. It is by the late Joseph Machlis, ——–
AUTHOR of the most condescending — and most lucrative — of all college music-appreciation texts, who also headed a one-man translation factory capable of transforming librettos in any foreign language into verbal fudge. And so the subtle glints of Georges Bernanos’ French words were turned lumpy and percussive in the thudding of Machlis‘ consonants, and by that margin of error it would have been better if USC’s efforts simply hadn‘t taken place.

Late last month, yet another student ensemble from USC, led by the fearless Donald Crockett, had taken over one of the Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella concerts, in a program of important and difficult music by Louis Andriessen and Morton Feldman. Both the Times‘ Mark Swed and I praised the enterprise but suggested — each of us in a single, somewhat wistful sentence — that the young performing forces may have been in over their collective heads.

Ka-booom! A week later the Times published a fulminating response to Swed’s review by Stephen Hartke, a composer on the USC faculty who has also worked for the Philharmonic as a pre-concert lecturer and program annotator, and who had at this very concert taken credit for its planning. Unearthing just about every cliche in the eternal cat-vs.-dog between the creative and the critical community, and shooting himself in the foot at every turn, Hartke proclaimed that musicians and critics ”view each other with morbid fascination.“ Criticism is ”forever earthbound, mired in the banal necessity of making the nonverbal verbal.“ Swed‘s single sentence becomes a copious flow of venom, directed at a ”rare and stunning performance that a large and diverse audience had responded to with prolonged enthusiasm.“

Aside from several layers of conflict of interest involved — Hartke does, after all, glean a few bucks from the Philharmonic in the banal process of making the nonverbal verbal — he glides rather glibly over the fact that, sure, the cheers rang out in Zipper Hall that night, from a clearly partisan audience of USC classmates. The worst aspect of Hartke’s blatantly self-serving letter, in fact, is its subtext: the factionalism that instills deep divisions with-in the new-music scene. The USC crowd hangs together and yells its collective self hoarse at each other‘s accomplishments; so does the UCLA crowd; so does the CalArts crowd; they travel with their own cheering sections. (Last week’s EAR Unit concert came well-equipped with CalArts cheerleaders, but I looked in vain for faculty members from other schools, even though USC‘s Crockett was among the performers.) The Los Angeles area is one of the most active new-music venues in the country, and every event should ideally nourish and stimulate the entire community. Actions like Stephen Hartke’s preposterous letter can only slow the process.

And by the way, I make the necessity of making the nonverbal verbal my most rewarding challenge — and not a bit banal.

Dirty old man gets hots for sweet young thing, ends up with egg on face. A week that began with Der Rosenkavalier in Costa Mesa and moved on to Don Pasquale at the Music Center bore reminders of how much of the realm of operatic comedy rests on that one plot device, and of how many changes can, indeed, be rung on it. The Figaro operas, Verdi’s and Nicolai‘s Falstaff, Die Meistersinger . . . the list goes on.

It’s a treacherous repertory. Musical ensembles are difficult to balance, all the more so when the matter is a duet between a fat, loud basso profundo, tossing off torrents of words, and a chirpy soubrette kicking back, and when the action proceeds lickety-split. The ideal comic-opera audience is denied much time to breathe. I checked what I‘d written about the L.A. Opera’s first Don Pasquale — the same Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production, staged by the same Stephen Lawless — in March 1995: exquisite set, audiences limp with helpless laughter, no gimmicks, only the comic spirit at its most vibrant. Last week, six years later, I saw a dusty old set wobbling in every breeze, an audience (this member, at least) limp with helpless boredom, a production loaded with stage gadgetry — the Norina in a floor-length formal ball gown, inexplicably hanging out the wash on a rooftop — the comic spirit vibrating in its death throes. When all goes well, Don Pasquale is short, snappy and brilliantly to the point. All didn‘t go so well on opening night, however, when some of the scene changes took up almost as much time as the scenes themselves.

Oh yes, there were moments. One in particular, which I always wait for, sounds a sudden note of seriousness for about three and one-half memorable seconds. Foolish old Pasquale has been tricked into marriage with the disguised Norina, who quickly turns vixen. At the height of their squabbling she slaps him, but immediately realizes that perhaps she has gone too far. The music slows and drops into a minor key; there is a breath-catching moment of self-examination. Ruth Ann Swenson, the Norina this time, went through this small bit in winsome pantomime, a memory I was happy to take home. My other fave moment comes soon after, the hilarious patter duet between the bassos — first the one, then the other, then both in a prodigy of sync. Claudio Desderi and Rodney Gilfry had all but stopped the show in 1995, but Simone Alaimo and Thomas Allen barely got the words out, against the flabby backdrop of Emmanuel Joel’s orchestra. Greg Fedderly was the Ernesto as in 1995, sporting an announced sinus condition to no audible detriment. But I had to go home and restore my faith in this masterpiece: the complete 1932 performance with Tito Schipa heading an inspired cast, still listed in Schwann, one of the genuine wonders of recorded opera. They don‘t make ’em like that anymore.

Opera Pacific‘s Der Rosenkavalier cut no corners. Other productions of this wise and bittersweet comedy (the one self-indulgence my dietitian allows) have gotten by with a few judicious cuts here and there — the lecherous Baron Ochs’ interminable first-act disquisition on bedroom politics, for one. Artistic director John DeMain‘s decision was to ignore the time clock, both by opening all cuts and by opting for tempos so spacious that even the opera’s most caloric segments — which, let‘s face it, are numerous — seemed downright healthful. The opera’s defining moment, the final trio in which possession of the heart and soul of the young Rose-Cavalier passes from the aging Marschallin to the ardent adolescent Sophie, flowed like the purest Viennese Schlagobers under the star-studded sky of Bruno Schwengl‘s garden set.

Texas-born Helen Donath, a longtime Opera Pacific stalwart, was the wise if somewhat soft-spoken Marschallin; Patricia Risley, in her company debut, was an athletic, scene-stealing, thoroughly believable Octavian; Nancy Allen Lundy was the sweet-voiced if rather pallid Sophie. German bass Markus Hollop was the woolly-voiced Ochs. Best of all was James Maddalena — remembered as the Tricky Dick of Nixon in China when DeMain conducted the Houston world premiere — as the nouveau riche Faninal.

Above any of these individual contributions, the essence of this Rosenkavalier lay in the shaping force of DeMain’s musical leadership, plus the luminescence of his orchestra on an admirably good horn night. Jay Lesenger‘s direction was a further positive force; the last-act hijinks, the farce played on the hapless Ochs, unrolled with a rare antic wisdom. The many hours moved swiftly forward.

Onto another planet there came Harry Christophers’ vocal ensemble called The Sixteen, filling the acoustically splendid Precious Blood Church with Holy Week music by Tomas Luis de Victoria — presented, need I add, by the Da Camera Society‘s Chamber Music in Historic Sites. The Spanish-born Victoria (1549–1611) worked in Rome, at a time when the fabulous counterpoints of the High Renaissance music were becoming “polluted” with the dissonances and passionate melodic lines of the early baroque. A full evening of Victoria’s Lamentations for Thursday, Friday and Saturday, the dark days leading to Easter, became a stirring, heartrending experience — as would that other sublime masterwork meant for the same time of year, Bach‘s St. Matthew Passion (about which more next week), 150 years later. Christophers’ superb vocal group, like their compatriots the Tallis Scholars, have moved some distance from the oh-so-pure attitudes that bleached out the first years of Britain‘s early-music revival. They have corrupted their ranks by admitting (horror!) women. They sing with the awareness that their music is beautiful, which it overwhelmingly, powerfully is.

By interesting coincidence, the next night found the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at Royce Hall, under guest conductor and early-music authority Bernard Labadie of Quebec, performing the two early Haydn symphonies that bear subtitles relating to Holy Week observance (Nos. 26, “Lamentation,” and 49, “Passion”), vivid Sturm-und-Drang pieces teeming — as had the Victoria works — with dissonance and outcry. Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater shared the program, also appropriate for the season, but otherwise one of music‘s droopier landmarks.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself: Does the world deserve me, or vice versa?

”My opinion is correct; therefore, your opinion must be wrong“; so — in so many words — writes a self-appointed protector of Stravinsky on last week‘s Letters page.

”Natter natter,“ says a man no longer young, seated behind me at last week’s Richard Goode recital: ”Left-hand rhythms, natter, Horowitz, chatter, Rubinstein, clatter“ — all in the voice of authority clearly aimed at edifying the several rows around us. Later I learn, as I had guessed, that he‘s a pianist not yet recognized.

At a press conference, a disheveled type pushes toward me. ”I hope you live long enough to take back everything you’ve ever written about Leonard Bernstein,“ he growls, and shoves off before I can answer. If I took back everything, the ratio of yea to nay would probably be exactly what it is now. Some people have selective memories. And I always weep buckets at the end of West Side Story.

Changing my mind, through the discovery of new evidence against a long-held prejudice or simply through a sudden realignment of the gray cells, is one of my favorite exercises, even when — as recently, alas — it proves futile. It got me to the Philharmonic‘s final Stravinsky program, the Green Umbrella event at Zipper Hall three weeks ago, despite my previous words of displeasure toward the dry-point music of the composer’s late years. It got me to the full orchestral concert last week, in hopes of re-examining my often-expressed distaste for the sound and substance of Sibelius. Among my fellow Sibeliophobes, after all, the Seventh Symphony holds a place of honor because of its brevity.

Abraham and Isaac was the major novelty on the Stravinsky program, a setting by the octogenarian composer of biblical verses, set to what I still hear as random zigzag lines vaguely related to 12-tone techniques Stravinsky attempted to swallow in his late years. The considerable power this time lay in Sanford Sylvan‘s eloquent delivery, from memory, of the Hebrew text. By far the best of the concert was the Octet from four decades previous; that work is also fashioned out of jagged lines, but they are so ordered that each one becomes a lightning stroke. The performance under Esa-Pekka Salonen, in my admittedly warped opinion, was the best thing in the entire Stravinsky festival.

A Sibeliophile friend up north, with whom I have argued for over half a century, wrote that Salonen’s performance of the Seventh, which he had heard during the Philharmonic‘s recent Bay Area visit, was not to be missed. Maybe so, but in the performance at the Music Center last week, I heard what I always hear in this work: tortured, gesturesome oratory buried down deep inside an orchestration murky and impenetrable. It probably did sound better in the intense, bright acoustics of San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall; at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, little came off the stage. When Walt Disney Concert Hall is finished, this is the music they should use for sound check, but I can‘t think of any other reason for performing it.

Music very old and very new: Among recent musical events, two concerts also projected the always-fascinating interaction of sight and sound. Jordi Savall came to Royce Hall with Hesperion “I, his early-music ensemble (its title newly updated, as befits the new century), in a program from the Sephardic Diaspora, 700 years old plus or minus, in a cultural swath from Spain to the Middle East. A remarkable and most lovable force majeure, this Savall, whom we admire from recordings (the Bach Suites on Astree, the ”Eroica“ on Fontalis), the one-of-a-kind film Tous les Matins du Monde and, better yet, these explorations into a particularly color-drenched region of ancient musical history. Listening to his splendid players in dances, chants, love songs and ecstatic religious outbursts — most of it improvised or leached out of manuscript fragments — you can’t help entertaining visions of mosaics and frescoes spangled with glints of gold. In a world blessed with dozens of early-music specialists and ensembles, Savall‘s group has settled into a niche peculiarly — and wonderfully –its own.

By an interesting coincidence, this Sunday afternoon concert at Royce was followed, a short stroll away, by more ancient Mediterranean music: the players, singers and whirling dervishes of the Damascus-based Al-Kindi Ensemble in a program that seemed to pick up from Hesperion’s music and transport it farther to the east. To a nonbeliever the music bordered on the interminable, the ecstatic whirling somewhat strange in a concert-hall setting but exhilarating nonetheless. Both concerts, by the way, were unnecessarily amplified.

At last week‘s Green Umbrella, Donald Crockett brought the USC Thornton Contemporary Music Ensemble and Chamber Choir into a brush with two widely differing recent painting-inspired works: Louis Andriessen’s 1985 Mondrian tribute De Stijl and Morton Feldman‘s 1971 Rothko Chapel. You couldn’t find two works further apart in sound and substance — Andriessen‘s exuberant incursion into Piet Mondrian’s own mingled passions for geometry and boogie-woogie, Feldman‘s capturing in near silence the deep and poignant mystery of the small building in Houston that houses Rothko’s last work. Memorable, the courage (almost but not entirely rewarded) that would entrust these two killer masterworks to student forces; memorable also the chance to experience them side by side.

There had been good things along the way in Richard Goode‘s well-attended Music Center concert, but his management of the inexorable rise and fall and rise again of the emotion in the concluding Beethoven sonata was by some distance the evening’s highlight. I‘ve already used the word ecstatic twice, but I’ve also never found a better way to describe the final five minutes of this work, Beethoven‘s next-to-last sonata, the A-flat Opus 110. The fugue, its theme about as simple as a cohesive musical idea can be, is halted for a moment by a slow intrusion. It struggles, shakes itself free and resumes its inexorable forward momentum. Higher and higher it climbs, and the harmony intensifies like the slow turning of a screw. Like the aforementioned Bernstein bit, it’s music I can‘t think about without going bananas.

George Grove, lighthouse builder

Precious words abide. In 1986, I turned up in one of the Grove dictionaries as “an unpredictable gadfly”; now, in the latest Grove, I still am. At least they spelled my name right, both times.

The latest arrival is the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (hereafter NewGroveII). In the 21 years since NewGroveI the noble and time-honored lexicon has proliferated; the family now includes AmeriGrove, OperaGrove, JazzGrove and SheGrove (women composers). In its print version, NewGroveII consists of 29 volumes (up from the 20 of NewGroveI ); there‘s an index volume, for the first time since 1890; there are 29,000 articles, for a total of 25 million words (their count, not mine); nearly 9,000 of the articles are newly commissioned; 2,000 articles are on world music, compared to a mere 1,000 in NewGroveI. There is also an online edition, already available if still making its way toward completion; you get a few messages about such-and-such a file still being “under development.” The accompanying literature promises updates four times a year. At the moment, however, making your way through NewGroveII.com is a little like taking a hard-hat tour. The asking price is $4,850 for the print edition, and $295 per year for the online version. You could always wait for the movie.

Perhaps I shouldn’t strike so lightheaded a note about the most prestigious publication in any field of the arts, for this latest Grove, like every one of its predecessors, is exactly that. Few publications in any language challenge its awesome inclusiveness. Take an overview of the way the Grove editors have defined “inclusiveness” in every succeeding edition and you end up with a fascinating map with consistently expanding borders, a study in the evolution of musical taste. Take just one example, comparing the content of NewGroveI and NewGroveII: In the 1980 edition the alphabetical sequence went from “Raoux” to “Rapeguero”; in the NewGroveII the sequence is “Raoux” to “Rap” to “Rapeguero,” with David Toop‘s piece on rap decked out with an impressive bibliography.

George Grove (1820–1900) was the kind of dedicated connoisseur the English have always been particularly good at breeding. His father was a fishmonger at Charing Cross; young George studied engineering, and built cast-iron lighthouses in Jamaica and Bermuda. Somehow he got from there to a secretaryship at London’s Crystal Palace, where he wrote program notes for concerts. An admiring George Bernard Shaw noted that Grove “fed on Beethoven‘s symphonies as the gods in Das Rheingold fed on the apples of Freia.” With his friend Arthur Sullivan (of “Gilbert-and-” fame) he played a huge role in unearthing Schubert manuscripts that had been scattered among collections all over Europe. In 1873 he joined the publishing firm of Macmillan to edit their new Dictionary of Music and Musicians; the first of four volumes appeared in 1879. His own articles on Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn were included in the first three editions, although their content of passion extended them far out of proportion to other articles — 57 pages for Mendelssohn against 12 for Bach. (Grove’s three articles were eventually dropped, and published in a separate volume in 1951 — worth the search.)

Bach and Mendelssohn had regained their proper size long before NewGroveII, but something of Grove himself persists. Along with such later avatars as England‘s Donald Tovey and our own Nicolas Slonimsky, Grove was a special breed of compiler, clearly descended from the archetypal Samuel Johnson, with his own Dictionary of 100 years before. Unlike the straight-arrow collaborators on Germany’s Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart — the only effort comparable in size and splendor — Grove‘s people always seem to emulate the master in dispensing incontestable information with one hand and an unmistakable passion for their subjects with the other. Whether you land at Toop’s well-documented pieces on rap, gangsta and hip-hop, or Robert Winters‘ new Schubert study, with all the recently discovered and re-evaluated big works in proper perspective, the old sense I’ve always gotten from Grove — the strange but lovable mix of deep research and deep feeling — remains in place in this new edition. (I did find it disheartening, though, to discover in the Schubert article two song titles misspelled on the same line: “Liebesbotschat” for “Liebesbotschaft” and “Standcher” for “Standchen.”)

There are, of course, other nits to pick, as in any 25-million-word undertaking. We are reminded once again that our overseas colleagues still haven‘t accepted the notion of cultural possibilities this far from Big Ben; this shows up in an ongoing tendency to allot Los Angeles — and everything else west of the Alleghenies — only the shortest of shrift. The first version of the current Los Angeles article appeared in 1980, returned in the 1986 AmeriGrove, expanded ever so slightly for the 1992 OperaGrove and now has shrunk back for its current incarnation. It is the work of the venerable UCLA scholar Robert Stevenson. It takes the Los Angeles Opera (under its former, now-obsolete title) up to its 1986 opening night and no further, ignores entirely any new-music developments and, in short, writes off as unimportant the nearly two decades of growth that have defined this area.

Okay, it’s a small matter — if not as small as Dr. Stevenson and his editors would have the world believe. Here is something of greater concern. In considering with awe and admiration this new blockbuster compilation of everything in music worth knowing, you may stop to wonder where it all fits in the currently troubled world of serious musical thinking. Will all that knowledge — about Schubert, or hip-hop, or Duke Ellington (with Andre Hodeir‘s original article eloquently expanded by Gunther Schuller) — create a new generation of music consumer adept in the use of ears and in processing the information they harvest?

Several weeks ago one of our serious-music radio stations, one without commercials and therefore, you want to believe, free to explore interesting cultural byways, canceled a popular weekly program devoted to music before Bach. When confronted with complaints, an executive explained that the station preferred to concentrate on “significant” composers — thus relegating to “insignificance” such nonentities as Purcell, Monteverdi, Palestrina, Dufay, Machaut or Hildegard von Bingen. I don’t know what musical treatises grace the bookshelves of KUSC‘s Brenda Barnes, if any, but if you had to guess which — the 29 volumes of NewGroveII or one of the dozens of current sleazeball tomes with names like Mozart for Idiots and Who’s Afraid of Classical Music? — you wouldn‘t need my help. Whatever its greatness, the indispensible new Grove just might become, against today’s cultural realities, an insignificant other.

Murray Perahia‘s concert at the Cerritos Center last week strengthened my conviction that he is the most satisfactory, the most honorable, American pianist. Watching him at work, you are touched by his sublime confidence. He knows what he’s good at, and he tells you that what he‘s good at is also what he loves. He has little to do with the knock-’em-down repertory that serves other pianists as hobbyhorses; Bach dines well at his table, but not Rach. At Cerritos he shared the stage and the program with the much-loved small British ensemble the Academy of St. Martin–in-the-Fields; he performed concertos by Bach and Mozart, conducting from the keyboard, then stood to lead Mozart‘s 40th Symphony. He has often led his own concerto performances; now he is branching into standup conducting as well. Wish him well; his performance of that troubled, overpowering masterwork among Mozart’s symphonies was forthright and beautifully proportioned. Using a work of that seriousness to end a concert, instead of tucking it in as a curtain raiser as some conductors do with Mozart, was further proof of Perahia‘s high intelligence.

What’s my favorite Mozart piano concerto? people feel the need to ask. “The last one I‘ve heard,” is my standard reply. Right now, therefore, it’s the G-major, K. 453, which Perahia played last week. It‘s one of the more lighthearted on the list, a creation of light and air and even — as Mozart himself confessed — bird song. In most of his mature concertos, special miracles happen when Mozart brings the orchestra’s woodwinds forward to mingle their own dreams with those of the pianist. In this concerto there is such a passage midway in the first movement, at the start of the development: flute, oboes and bassoons melding into a mellow dialogue about nothing in particular, up and down the scale, as the piano‘s triplets surround them in flickering soft lights. This is chamber music at its most enlightened, a conversation among equals who know how to blend without losing individuality. A virtuoso pianist in a large-scale performance — the noble Rubinstein, say, or the elder Serkin — backed at full volume by a symphony orchestra, can miss the whole point of this quiet miracle, and I have the discs to prove it. At Cerritos, even through cough-ridden air as if a siege of black lung had settled in, that mysterious moment became magic, and so did the moments around it.

Then there was Bach, the same D-minor Concerto whose powers and eloquence Andras Schiff had convincingly demonstrated with the Philharmonic last November. Yet there were new things to discover, above all the way Perahia shaped the flexible, rhapsodic one-finger melody that hangs in the air like a meditation, a benediction, above the gruff, stentorian, repeated bass line in the slow movement. You talk about Bach as the monarch of musical squareness; go listen to that remarkable movement — on Perahia’s new Sony disc, or the Schiff, or the crazy-wonderful Glenn Gould — and find your horizons broadened, your estimates of “square” shattered.

It was, in case all this gush hasn‘t gotten through, a marvelous concert, one of two extraordinary, uplifting, unforgettable events so far this season.

The other was, of course, the Orange County Philharmonic Society’s Vivaldi program at Costa Mesa, with the incomparable Cecilia Bartoli and the lively, enterprising small ensemble called Il Giardino Armonico, who together provided a garden of harmonies such as only the serenest angels might provide. It‘s tempting to draw parallels between the two supreme artists whose praises I sing herewith. They share an off-the-wall definition of appropriate repertory. As Perahia’s abjuring the Rach 3, so Bartoli‘s abstaining from Carmen or Amneris; yet the one plays Mozart and Bach, and the other sings Vivaldi.

She sang — a varied and generous program fattened with a garland of encores that cantilevered well past quitting time — and each new number was a further revelation of how little we know about this revolutionary Italian composer who taught young girls most of his life and composed music of a depth of passion such that no young girl then or now should be allowed to hear unchaperoned. The arias sang of love requited, and of the unrequited itch. A mother’s blood turns icy at her dead son‘s ghost, and the stillness is wrenched by turns of harmony that Mahler, two centuries later, might countenance. The breezes tell the shepherdess of love, and we must giggle along. The repertory, still too little known, is rich and glorious; what has happened in the Handel rediscovery must now take place for Vivaldi.

What is amazing above all is the care and wisdom that Bartoli has come to lavish on this music; you don’t expect that much explorative zeal from an operatic superstar at the height of her career. (Read Manuela Hoelterhoff‘s Bartoli book, Cinderella Company, the best revelation there is on what it’s like to be a diva in operadom‘s daily snake pit, and you’ll glean more reasons to respect Bartoli‘s high art.) Her technique, above all her command of divisions in the coloratura singing — four notes in the space of one, then eight, then 16 — was close to awesome that night; pushing on toward 11 p.m., it was as fresh and lovable as at 8:30. She has really worked her way into the repertory; unlike the typical tour date, when the diva comes out and sings through her latest album, only two or three of her numbers were also on her Vivaldi disc (on Decca). Are there discernible horizons for an artist of that much skill and intelligence and the power to make strong-willed music critics weak in her presence? Why should there be?

I had entertained a few qualms about the Giardino Armonico, brought on by an overly cute TV promo of a few years back that smacked of Vivaldi vandalism — but no. Either the group has grown up or I have; their work with Bartoli, and in a couple of concertos nicely interspersed to give the diva some breathing time, became an honorable part of the love feast that night. I am not ordinarily given to superlatives (or “faves,” as one thuggish acquaintance calls them), but if I have ever attended a better vocal recital than this, it would have to be in some other incarnation, on some other planet.