So I've Heard

Leonard Bernstein, the story goes, once described Olivier Messiaen as ”God‘s cocktail pianist.“ Cute and to the point, I guess, but I wonder how many of His bar patrons would hang out, ordering refills, with Messiaen at the keyboard walloping away on his Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jesus. One or two of these ”contemplations“ at a time, more-earthly pianists have found, can go a long way. At Pasadena‘s Neighborhood Church, where Mark Robson played the entire 20 as the latest program in the excellent ”Piano Spheres“ series, there were empty seats after intermission, and the fault was surely not Robson’s. The concert ran close to two and a half hours; it was a heroic, distinguished event.

I seem to be undergoing an epiphany of my own with Messiaen. His opera on St. Francis, which I had squirmed through in bafflement and boredom at the 1983 Paris premiere, turns out thrilling on the DG recording under Kent Nagano, as noted here a while back. And after expending some effort over the years dodging the Vingt Regards in live performance or disc, I found last week‘s hearing enthralling — exasperating, yes; hilarious at times, yes; monumentally overextended, yes beyond doubt — yet irresistible. There is some kind of human essence here, making itself known only after a journey beset by extreme and perilous torture.

Stirred though I am by the sheer impact of this music, I could not, of course, imagine myself or anyone else being converted to Messiaen’s exuberant Catholic piety just from hearing it, even as the composer draws the curtain back 20 separate times on the full repertory of the miracles of faith. He doesn‘t offer the personal shivers that we get all the way through the Bach Passions or in the last moments of Parsifal. He skips all the good storytelling in the Bible and takes us directly to Revelation, which he doesn’t so much explain as paint over its outlines with a full, wet brush.

The music‘s ancestry is easy to fathom: Liszt at his most flamboyant, Scriabin at his most crazed, the ecstatic visions of the much-undervalued Szymanowski. Add to this Messiaen’s apparent fascination with high-class trash: the parallel ninths and added-sixth chords of a particularly greasy jazz style itself descended from Ravel; some Gershwin (but not enough). What is truly great in this music, and it was enough to sustain quite a few people in Pasadena that night, is the range of color, resonance and sonority — that, and the act of faith and pure physical strength that the music demands from anyone foolhardy enough to take it on. I don‘t know whether I was made to care about Messiaen himself any more after the performance than I usually do; it was the process of turning his certifiably mad visions into dazzling piano music that made the evening memorable.

In their way, Mozart’s piano concertos are also visionary works; they offer as much proof as anyone needs of the existence of Higher Powers. Every so often the clouds part — at the end of the slow movement of K. 482, in the clarinet duet in the slow movement of K. 488 or the F-major episode in the finale of K. 503 — and God smiles down in joyous amazement. I had missed the Hollywood Bowl debut of the young Korean pianist Seung-Un Ha in 1998; her performance of K. 503 with Jeffrey Kahane and his Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at Royce Hall last Friday bore eloquence and promise. Tall in stature and long of arm, with hair nearly as long as Kahane is tall, she writhed her way prettily through the work‘s majestic measures, reacting beautifully to the expressive high points, seconded by Kahane’s properly large-scale shaping of this extraordinary — if still too little-known — masterwork from Mozart‘s maturity.

Benjamin Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge was further adornment to a lively program, music we usually greet with an ”Oh no, not that again“ and then don‘t really listen. I listened this time; LACO’s gleaming string tone made it pleasurable. It‘s an exceptional work, Britten at 23, twisting his old teacher’s quite ordinary tune into a complex, fascinating compositional adventure: not merely ”variations“ in the classic sense but a whole series of twitchings and tweakings and, toward the end, rhapsodic excursions of piercing beauty. Arvo Part‘s Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, 10 or so minutes of a single held breath, and Witold Lutoslawski’s early Dance Preludes, trivial against his later achievements but nicely tootled by LACO‘s clarinetist Gary Gray, rounded out the evening.

To end the third orchestral program in the Philharmonic’s admirable Stravinsky cycle, Esa-Pekka Salonen brilliantly delivered his by-now-familiar wingding version of the complete Firebird. As in the past, however, he did not convince me that the entire 44-minute span — with quite a lot of time-marking music running on and on, with, to be sure, gorgeous fairy-tale orchestration before the big numbers hit — is the right way to transplant this score from the dance stage to the concert hall. The prevailing belief — that the greater the stature of a composer, the more precious every note of the music — is threatened by historical realities; it would not surprise me someday to find the first 25 minutes of The Firebird in the same discard pile with, say, Beethoven‘s Variations on ”God Save the King“ and Wagner’s C-major Symphony.

Olli Mustonen was the alert soloist in Stravinsky‘s three works for piano and orchestra, his fingers kept so busy-busy in all three that he had less time than usual for the arm-windmill antics that make his playing hard to watch. Of these works, the two from the neoclassical 1920s — the Concerto for Piano and Winds, a masterpiece, and the Capriccio, modest and bubbly — were worth the effort. The third, the 1959 Movements, is short but awful, Stravinsky keeping up with the guys (Boulez and Berio, mostly), affecting the air of modernism that ends up as gross parody. Stravinsky biographer Stephen Walsh made a nice point in his pre-concert talk. The greatest dread of the modernist, he said, is that people won’t think you‘re modern enough. It certainly applies to the tatters that survive from Stravinsky’s pathetic last years. Movements put me in mind of a movie I once saw, with the senile Picasso quickly daubing his signature on small porcelain plates and handing them off to be sold. How sad.

The Philharmonic’s Stravinsky Festival is at its midpoint as I write. That the performances have been splendid is, of course, a given; something in Esa-Pekka Salonen’s own lively curiosity, his way of reacting to musical adventure of high audacity, the clear long-range vision that enables him to command the cumulative growth of a piece, are marvelously engaged by Stravinsky’s own art. (That same control over developing line, which at times in the past has been challenged in Salonen’s forays into the earlier repertory, made his previous week’s performance of the Beethoven Seventh Symphony an exhilarating surprise.)

The festival has been nicely planned; someone in the Philharmonic management obviously clings to the belief that a thinking audience still exists. Stravinsky’s own presence in Los Angeles has been explored in some depth, in discussions at several venues. Nobody has thought to revive any of Stravinsky’s unhappy run-ins with the movie machine – an insignificant effort from 1934 called The Firebird, which helped itself to some of that music; Le Sacre du Printemps, hacked to bits to assuage Disney’s dinosaurs in Fantasia; the planned score for The Song of Bernadette that ended up instead in the Symphony in Three Movements – and it’s just as well. Instead, we got to meet people who worked with Stravinsky’s music on happier projects. Bill Kraft, former Philharmonic percussionist, let loose some vivid memories at the first pre-concert program. The second program was even more vivid; dancers John Clifford, who had danced in Agon under George Balanchine, and Carole Valleskey, the Chosen One in the Joffrey Ballet’s restoration of the original Le Sacre choreography, re-enacted some of their steps in a space about the size of this page. Then we all went into the hall and heard Agon and Le Sacre with ears and eyes newly refreshed.

In the hall there were other amenities: film with old Igor – always the congenial ham anywhere near a camera – abetting Nicolas Nabokov in killing a bottle of scotch; and with the teacher and earth mother Nadia Boulanger proclaiming a place for Stravinsky in the musical
firmament. There was also “The Star-Spangled Banner,” in the cockeyed re-harmonization that Stravinsky had created here in 1941 and offered as a kind of bribe to the U.S. in anticipation of his citizenship application. (Ah, memories, memories; I was an usher in Boston’s Symphony Hall the night in 1944 when the cops arrived, primed for action should Stravinsky again perpetrate this “tampering with national property,” as he had at his concert the day before. He didn’t.)

At one of the pre-concert gatherings, the composer Stephen Hartke spoke of Stravinsky’s ability to “reinvent” himself – the transitions, for example, from the brutalism of Le Sacre to the austere neoclassicism of Perséphone to the dabbling in 12-tone writing, of which Agon was an early example. It’s a valid way of looking at his work, certainly; if you try to trace a musical genealogy from, say, Le Sacre of 1913 to the Octet of 1923, or from the airy diatonicism of the 1934 Perséphone to the jaunty banishments of tonality in the 1953 Agon, you might need to imagine some drastic DNA shifts along the way. Yet there are shreds of connective tissue: the hard, clean edges and delicious rhythmic quirks in Les Noces help bridge one gap; the ecstatic, floating harmonies in the Balanchine ballet Orpheus – music eminently deserving of a life in the concert hall – do the same later on. Some things remain constant, above all Stravinsky’s immaculate awareness of the nature of movement within any given moment, or in the maintaining of a taut line of progress in a work from start to finish.

My real problem with Stravinsky – and I had better admit right now that I do have problems – is the demand his music exerts that I as listener, too, must endure a similar process of self-reinvention. At Salonen’s first Stravinsky program, the 1930 Symphony of Psalms left me exalted, fulfilled; it is music that I see as well as hear: see as dark stained glass shot through with streaks of dusky gold, hear as a celebration of humanness defying inhuman powers and emerging in triumph ringed in resounding alleluias. (Ah, memories, memories; I am driven to confess, for the first time ever, that in 1948 I reviewed those final pages – for The American Record Guide, when it used to be worth reading – as “mawkish.” Ingemisco, tamquam reus . . .)

There followed, however, the Perséphone of 1934: André Gide’s other kind of rite of spring set to Stravinsky in his cerulean-purity mode. Music that suspends time is not of itself boring: Schubert’s G-major Piano Sonata, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Perséphone is; you have to wonder at its survival, however sporadic: Is it Stravinsky, or merely something else by Stravinsky, a routine reinvention undeserving of its patent? And then you have to reinvent yourself as listener, cast out the spell of the Psalms and its barbaric insinuations, and enter into a less happy image of an inventing machine subsisting for the moment on its own whir. And perhaps the occasion reinvented itself, too, into a more noncommittal kind of performance, with inferior soloists (Holland Taylor narrating in a hoarse, inappropriate English; John Aler’s bland, unmusical French) and the Master Chorale suggesting that it had worked harder and with greater pleasure on the Psalms.

Stravinsky on this diatonic plateau – this work, plus the Violin Concerto and the other pieces for the shaky fiddling of Samuel Dushkin, plus the desiccated twitchings of the Jeu de Cartes ballet – seems to me a reinventor in a creative lull. These things happen, and they do not detract from the huge shadow cast by this tiny elf with, as the movies show, the too-many teeth. Composers who point to Stravinsky as a defining figure, of his own century and continuing into ours, usually cannot pinpoint any specific influence from his pen to theirs. He created no school and left no followers, as did Schoenberg and the Second-Wieners. That doesn’t matter. What matters most is the creative energy he brought to the world around him. More than anyone else in his century, he continued the notion that music was important, that it merited attention and the license to survive. You can’t patent that; it’s too precious.

In 48 B.C. or thereabouts, some kind of hanky-panky may or may not have occurred between Julius Caesar, conqueror of Egypt, and Cleopatra, claimant to that country‘s throne. Caesar was 52 at the time; Cleopatra was 20. Several centuries later, George Bernard Shaw, and after him Cecil B. De Mille, dealt with that liaison in realistic terms: a paternal Caesar holding a kittenish Cleopatra at arm’s length. Not so, however, Nicola Francisco Haym, whose libretto for George Frideric Handel‘s Giulio Cesare in Egitto deals with, among other matters, the burning desire of both principals to make their way toward a shared bed. Handel’s music for Caesar, written for an ardent, young-sounding castrato rather than a lordly baritone, suspends historical verities in favor of romance.

One charming similitude exists between the Cleopatra of De Mille‘s 1934 epic and the character of that name onstage at the Music Center in Handel’s opera these nights. Both take baths. Claudette Colbert is, of course, demurely depicted; in her tub of asses‘ milk she could, for all one sees, be wearing a suit of armor. In Francesco Negrin’s version of the opera, brought in from Opera Australia and here through March 10, Elizabeth Futral strips down to the altogether behind a decorously deployed but rather flimsy towel, descends to her bath with a few anatomical details in clear and titillating view, kicks up soapsuds with a well-turned ankle — while singing her big Act 2 aria, ”Bella venere,“ an invocation, naturally enough, to the Goddess of Love.

As Handel‘s operas arrive at their deserved estate — they now bejewel the repertory of virtually all major houses — most of the bromides attached to them can be discarded. They are long, yes, and repetitious, yes, but singers with proper intelligence have learned how to make repetitions less repetitious and, thus, lengths less long. The singers involved in this Cesare do fine, agile tricks with repeats; furthermore, they are guided by the splendid musical imagination of the conductor, Britain’s Harry Bicket (well known from recordings) to realize the motive power of this intensely dramatic music.

Yes, there are three (counter)tenors, and the press-release people have had a field day over that. (There were also three countertenors in John Adams‘ El Niño, which I reported on recently, if anyone cares.) They belong; Handel put them there, and it isn’t often that a company is lucky enough to corral so spectacular a trio. David Daniels is the burly Cesare, buzz-cut and sporting a Don Johnson growth of beard, somewhat soft of voice for a 3,000-plus-seat auditorium if truth be told, but remarkable for the sensitivity and pure beauty of his singing. Bejun Mehta (related to Zubin over several degrees of separation) is the villainous Tolomeo, his icy-pure singing cutting through Handel‘s orchestra like an extension of the sword he artfully wields. In the smaller role of the weasely go-between Nireno, David Walker manages a delightful and compelling squeak. Our two local mezzo-sopranos — Suzanna Guzman, the Cornelia, and Paula Rasmussen, the Sesto — figure among the worthy participants.

And then there is Elizabeth Futral’s Cleopatra, on an even higher level than any of the above. She was the Stella in Andre Previn‘s hapless A Streetcar Named Desire at the San Francisco Opera, and an enchanting Violetta last season in a Traviata at Orange County’s Opera Pacific. Her Cleopatra — the voice radiantly pure over a phenomenal range, the acrobatic coloratura immaculately dispatched — proclaims her an artist with no discernible limitations. You could well wonder, as she and Daniels sang their final music out on a runway practically in the audience‘s lap, whether Handel himself, with all the legendary blather about his menagerie of singers, ever had it that good.

I also had to think back to Beverly Sills, whose career skyrocketed after her Cleopatra in 1966 — as Futral’s surely will now. I had to realize how far we‘ve come toward a realization of what these Handel operas are all about. The New York City Opera’s Julius Caesar — its first professional American staging — was hailed as a revelation, and I suppose it was. It was also wrong. The title role was transposed down so that the bass-baritone Norman Treigle, even with his vocal splendor, projected nothing of the fantasy — the moment, for example, when Caesar and the orchestra‘s first horn play around on the same pitch. The score was chopped to bits; music from other operas was inserted. Over the resultant mellifluous, gorgeous-sounding mess, we critics raved and raved. We, too, have come a long way.

Have I suggested with any of this that the Giulio Cesare currently downtown ranks as entertainment exhilarating, delectable and not to be missed? I hope so, because it does. The new production is great, good fun: high imagination and astounding music gloriously conjoined. Never have four hours seemed so short.

Against my usual broodings on the imperfections of the work itself, Opera Pacific’s Carmen also turned out to be time well spent. Credit, once again, befalls music director John DeMain for a sizzling pacing sparked with some enlightened decision making: Use the original version with spoken dialogue, thus losing about a quarter-hour of bad, time-wasting music; ditch the Act 4 ballet, ditto.

Irina Mishura was the rich-voiced, vivid Carmen, captivating while singing, not so much while dancing or wielding the castanets. Mark Baker was the Jose, Jeffrey Wells the Escamillo, both a point or two above adequate. Robin Follman‘s shrill, vibrato-ridden Micaela merely reminded me once again that this is opera’s most expendable role. The village scenes in the first and fourth act were full of life and color, and the kiddie chorus actually had interesting biz now and then. Again — as in the Handel, as in almost everything these days — the updating gremlins were at work; sets and costumes by Riccardo Hernandez and Constance Hoffman dragged the look of things into something vaguely 1940-ish. Mostly, however, it worked.

When Marino Formenti gave his first piano recital at LACMA’s Bing Theater last April, there were something like 50 people scattered through the 600-seat hall — the usual turnout, in other words, for a new-music program at the Museum. Two weeks ago, for the first of Formenti‘s three concerts this year, the hall was nearly full. Before the third concert, LACMA’s music director, Dorrance Stalvey, blinked unbelieving at the half-dozen remaining empty seats and congratulated the audience for its good taste and for the power of word of mouth. Congratulations are due Stalvey himself as well; he had picked up on Formenti when he was here with the “Resistance Fluctuations” concerts in 1998. (I must have heard him then, too, but you‘d never know from my review.) In yet another shrewd concert-management capture, Formenti returns next season (October 2) to terrorize an Eclectic Orange Festival audience with Jean Barraque’s Sonata, his incendiary calling card at LACMA last year.

For his programs this year, Formenti laid out a personal, perhaps not always workable, plan: “The Gods,” “The Heroes” and “The Men,” spanning the last century from Scriabin in 1907 to Jo Kondo in 1996. Rather than a dry-as-dust chronology, there were interesting byways that proved valuable. The tortuous reachings in a set of Etudes by Russia‘s Nikolai Roslavets, which began the first program, made the tortuous reachings in Scriabin’s Fifth Sonata, later on the same program, into something almost mistakable for musical sense. Framing the third program were two remarkable exercises in enhanced piano sonority: some small pieces by Helmut Lachenmann at the start that drew resonances out of piano keys held but not sounded; at the end an Alvin Lucier piece for piano and “amplified sonorous vessels” that created some of the same effects electronically. (And, therefore, easier? Less artistic? Formenti provided his own answer, a Debussy Prelude — Feux d‘Artifice — as encore that, eons earlier, had made some of the same sounds.)

It was this element of wit, of program building with imaginative juxtapositions, that invited an audience to retrace Formenti’s own voyages of discovery, that made these concerts memorable even beyond the awesome skill of his performances. As an interpreter he is his own man; beside the visionary heat of his Scriabin Fifth Sonata, the famous Horowitz recording may observe the markings more precisely but sounds like dry bones; in a group of Messiaen pieces in the second program, you could almost believe that Formenti had co-opted Messiaen‘s ecstasies as well as his notes. I love the intelligence in his playing, and his respect for mine; in even the most agonizing of his inscrutable choices — a pair of manic sonatas by Galina Ustvolskaya, let’s say, scored for fists and forearms — he gave off the sense of having resolved the madness as well as the music.

What kind of pianist is this Formenti, outside the specialized atmosphere of the present and immediate past? We don‘t know yet, although he dropped a tiny hint, offering a Schubert “Moment Musical” — nice and dry and immaculately shaped — as the encore at the second concert. Do we need to know? Not so long as there is music making up his sleeve similar to what he brought along this time. These were extraordinary concerts, the more so for the multitudes who came along to share.

Upstairs in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, John Kennedy gave last week’s Philharmonic pre-concert talk, a tangle of irrelevances, goof-strewn and clumsily delivered. “Just listen carefully” was his litany of advice for Franco Donatoni‘s Esa (In Cauda V) in its world premiere. Were we, then, to listen only casually to Radu Lupu’s eloquent, beautifully spacious reading of Schumann‘s Piano Concerto, or Esa-Pekka Salonen’s exhilarating delivery of the Beethoven Seventh — works of which careful listening reveals important newnesses every time? Downstairs in the hall, Salonen gave another talk, which set matters in better perspective.

Donatoni, he said, had been the most influential of his teachers; he composed the work in the hospital where he would die soon thereafter, at 73 last August 17; its title and its dedication bear Salonen‘s name. How, then, could he conduct in public so private a work? The answer, Salonen continued, lay in the work itself, its affirmation and its joyousness. Donatoni, whose fame rests on a small legacy of intricate, abstruse works little known outside his native Italy, has created in this one short score a glorious orchestral romp.

Its harmonies are not easily untangled on first hearing; it’s the spectrum of sound, the manic clatter of xylophone and chimes, the menacing, dark oratory of an oversize brass contingent (six horns, four trumpets, four trombones and tuba) that prove immediately winning. The other complexities will await future — and surely deserved — hearings. (What would it take, pray, to include a replay of such a work, only 11 minutes long after all, at the end of a concert, allowing the audience the option to go or stay?) In its final measures, a handful of instruments slide down the scale and out into silence: a presentiment of Donatoni‘s imminent end and, said Salonen, “the best of all possible ways to go.”

I’ve always admired the promotional skills of Southwest Chamber Music, if not always their music making, and if someone suggests that the group arranged this month‘s asteroid landing to promote its latest concert, I won’t argue. I earned early fame with my review (“a star-studded egg” in the New York Herald-Tribune) of John Cage‘s Atlas Eclipticalis at its 1964 New York premiere, and nothing would do but that I had to check it out again, as the Southwest people brought it to Zipper Hall to tie in with Pasadena’s “Universe” celebration. Cage and I had, in the meantime, become friends, which is not the same as each of us knowing what the other was about. Atlas Eclipticalis is built out of fascinating premises on paper; I just don‘t understand why it has to be performed.

The piece, by the way, comes with options, other works of Cage that can be added on by choice. The Leonard Bernstein performance I reviewed ran eight minutes; James Levine’s recording on DG runs 14; Southwest‘s Jeff von der Schmidt announced his as 40-plus, with the ensemble bolstered by young players from Pasadena’s John Muir High School. At Zipper, the second of two performances, they didn‘t quite make it. At about 32 minutes there was a sudden crash onstage, and a young percussionist named Jonathan Miller keeled over in a faint. He was soon revived, but the piece ended at that point. You try standing on an overlit stage, making sense out of abstruse counting derived from star maps, the I Ching and, for all I know, the downtown telephone book. Anyhow, John Cage would surely have approved.

On a rainy night last week I fell in love with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. Really, I mean, in love. I heard the first drumbeats as if they came from my own throbbing temples; the opening music for winds was smooth, elegant, angelic. (Has anyone written a book about Beethoven‘s use of the bassoon? Someone should.) The soloist, the Austrian violinist Thomas Zehetmair, did some odd things that weren’t in Beethoven‘s score, but they made sense.

Offhand, I would guess that I’ve listened to the Beethoven Violin Concerto — listened, that is, as opposed to just being in someone‘s house with the radio on — some 400 times, in various stages of rapture. What made the difference this time, in the Philharmonic’s program at the Music Center, was the contrast with the music that had come just before, which made Beethoven‘s drumbeats and those first woodwind chords seem, let’s say for the sake of simile, like the driest, most sublime martini, with the gin distilled by the hand of God.

That preceding music was the remains of the 11th Symphony by Eduard Tubin; this was its American premiere, with Paavo Jarvi conducting. It arrived surrounded by the kind of news that orchestra managements hope will attract box-office lines (with, however, only middling success at the Friday night concert). There was the exotic appeal: You don‘t hear music by an Estonian composer every day, especially when led by an Estonian conductor. There was the human-interest appeal: Tubin (1905–1982) died while at work on this symphony; only the first movement survived, with the orchestration completed by yet another Estonian, Kaljo Raid. And there was the stop-the-presses appeal: a first-ever American performance.

Given these exhilarating circumstances, perhaps it doesn’t matter that the music was not very good, but it should. Tubin‘s fame rests on his being famous, and on his stature as elder statesman to a generation of younger and better Estonians — Erkki-Sven Tuur, for one, and the late Lepo Sumera. Most of his symphonies have been recorded, on Sweden’s BIS label conducted by Neeme Jarvi, father of Paavo. It‘s good, solid late-romantic stuff, but you’ve heard it all before. Mahler lurks, as does Strauss and, in the more daring moments, Stravinsky. The woolly blanket of sound that smothered the music (and the listener) at the Music Center may have been the fault of the orchestrator, but what I heard in the work as content was also mostly gesture and cliche. (It too, pace Beethoven, begins with drumbeats.) Would it attract attention as the work of some minor Rhinelander circa 1911? Don‘t bet on it.

What got my back up about this insignificant time-waster was an article by Edward Rothstein in last Saturday’s New York Times that spoke directly to the current dark clouds over all of music, but over symphony orchestras in particular. His concern, in brief, is a growing lack of concern. It is no longer important, as it once was, for the nation‘s major orchestras to choose distinctive and adventurous leadership. The New York Philharmonic, which once had entrusted its bully pulpit to Leonard Bernstein and then to Pierre Boulez, has sunk to the hiring of Lorin Maazel, a move too inexplicable even to be explained away as “safe.” (Maazel is not only 70, conservative in programming taste and blandly efficient in quality of performance, but his history of inspiring unrest among players is vast and famous. Zubin Mehta was finally brought down by the New York Philharmonic’s failure to sell his recordings; who do you know who ever bought a Lorin Maazel disc?)

The sense of “cultural irrelevance,” says Rothstein, grows out of a lack of brilliant young talent, and out of a decline of orchestral attention to new music; the one, of course, feeds the other. A survey of patrons conducted in 1993 by the American Symphony Orchestra League produced the news that orchestras could attract new support by, among other things, redecorating their halls. That being so, the prospects should be bright in Cleveland (where the made-over Severance Hall reopened last month), Philadelphia (whose new orchestra hall opens next fall), New York (where plans for a rebuild of Lincoln Center were recently announced) and, of course, Los Angeles. But where are the announced plans, from any of those edifices present and future, for a rebuilding of cultural attitudes, for demonstrating a caring for music still awaiting creation in our new millennium — or, for that matter, of bringing awareness of the music around us up from its present circa-1915 level to, at least, the day before yesterday? The specious “novelty” of a symphony by Eduard Tubin doesn‘t go very far toward answering that question.

Esa-Pekka Salonen in Los Angeles, Michael Tilson Thomas in San Francisco — by that margin, the major West Coast orchestras are a few notches up from Ed Rothstein’s dour outlook. A festival of Stravinsky‘s music here in the upcoming weeks, or in San Francisco two summers ago, may not exactly advance the dateline. What is significant, however, about these events past and present is this: They have been planned (“packaged,” if you prefer) as if to offer a lot more than just a bath in some great music, as if an audience still exists for interactive programming — one work reflecting on another — along with talks and discussions.

Oh yes, about the Beethoven. It’s about time Thomas Zehetmair showed up here; his discs (especially several on ECM, of all labels the one most hospitable to the free of spirit) proclaim him one of a small band of trustworthy originals. His Beethoven bore this out not only in the goodies-laden cadenzas, but in the body of the work as well: the thread of pure, lustrous silk he fashioned in the heart-stopping G-minor episode in the first movement, and again throughout the slow movement.

The first-movement cadenza was a hoot and a half. From Beethoven‘s alternate piano version of the concerto, Zehetmair lifted the idea of inviting the timpani to join the solo violinist; he then took both instruments on a fabulous joy ride. Another escapade of similar high imagination linked the slow movement and finale, again with no harm done. Lovable though it be, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto needs a boost here and there, which it got this time — and how!

Jarvi, now 38, moves up in his world; he was a trainee back in the glory days of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute under Leonard Bernstein. He takes over the Cincinnati Symphony next September, an act of high bravery considering that the orchestra‘s great old hall confronts him with 3,417 seats to fill. To end last week’s concert he offered a goofy, pulverized version of Schumann‘s “Spring” Symphony, punctuated with tempo changes and huge timpani outbursts. At least it was interesting; this too is music that needs all the help it can get.

Threaded like a litany though the recent writing about John Adams — of which there has been considerable, local and national — is the proclamation of him as the most “accessible” of contemporary composers. Surely the term has the ring of truth, along with an undertone of danger.

“Accessibility” is often confused with “easy listening,” the domain of “good music” radio and its fellow combatants against the deadly peril of the 12-tone row and comparable atrocities. It may be true — although I haven’t actually checked — that John Adams has not yet inflicted a tone row on his public, but this has little bearing on his current accessibility. I think of a piece as accessible when it fulfills the function of letting me know where I am in the music at any moment, and whether it‘s worth my time to keep on being there. I would need quite a few semesters to teach the many ways music can accomplish this (and, by the way, I’m available). In case you‘re wondering, however, I can state that, yes, I found last week’s all-Adams program, which he conducted at the Philharmonic, most satisfyingly accessible, as I did his operatically leaning oratorio El Niño in San Francisco last month.

Let me go on a bit more about this accessibility thing. The fact that I happily tar John Adams with that brush has nothing to do with his predilection for composing real and memorable tunes in triadic harmony, with an orchestral palette that Richard Strauss might have gladly sanctioned, in rhythms that set the toes to tapping (but with an extra beat thrown in now and then for glorious obfuscation). Esa-Pekka Salonen‘s LA Variations, his great orchestral work of a couple of years ago, doesn’t display any of those predilections; I found it immediately accessible (as did a cheering crowd at the Philharmonic premiere) because it told us at every moment, in masterful, convincing terms, what it was about and where it was going.

A composer‘s chosen language — conservative, modernist, neo-this or post-that — is an inadequate criterion for a listener’s like or dislike. What matters far more is what the music is trying to say, and whether it actually says it. Arnold Schoenberg‘s Fourth String Quartet, one of those deadly perilous tone-row pieces you’re not likely to hear on local radio, strikes me as accessible because of the remarkable way its constructional genius makes itself heard. My problem with the music of Brahms, which I acknowledge as an obsession running through some 50 years of professional writing, stems from the conflict between recognizing where I am in, say, his First Piano Concerto or the Piano Quintet — to cite two particular bogeys — and my desperate desire to escape.

Adams‘ local program began with relatively new music, the piano concerto Century Rolls, composed for and played by the scholarly, classic-minded Emanuel Ax, who seemed freshly vitalized by the work. And why not? The music trips along blithely, enchantingly. Its title has to do with performance styles on old pianola rolls. More to the point, the benevolent shadow of Ravel — his Piano Concerto, most of all — falls across the work, to its great enlightenment. It dates from 1997, two years before Adams’ extraordinary Naive and Sentimental Music, with a lot less on its mind, perhaps, but with a lovely small message lovingly delivered.

Then came Nixon in China — in the portable version whimsically re-titled The Nixon Tapes — its stature so forcefully declared that you have to wonder why the opera hasn‘t, in its 14-year existence, become a repertory fixture alongside, say, Tosca. (It hasn’t done badly, in fact. I‘ve seen it in Helsinki; the English National Opera produced it last year; and let me point out that John DeMain, who led the world premiere in Houston in 1987, is now a local hero as head of Opera Pacific. How about it?) Adams’ luggage was lightly packed: the big arias for Dick (“News, news, news . . .”) and Pat (“This is prophetic”) and the banquet speech for Chou with the woozy chorus; I‘d have happily stayed longer for Madame Mao’s glorious aria, but that, alas, got left behind. James Maddalena was the Tricky Dick as before; I would hazard the guess that the operatic image of Nixon is by now, at least for the happy 3,000 who yelled themselves hoarse at the Music Center last Friday night, far more vivid than the dreary blur in the history books. Susan Narucki, a newcomer to the role of Pat, staked out an unchallengeable claim.

Kent Nagano led the bedazzlement of El Niño at San Francisco‘s Davies Hall, with radiant singing by Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Willard White to confirm the power of Adams’ Nativity oratorio. There were, however, problems. The temptation for all-out production was probably irresistible, and the musical work will surely outlive Peter Sellars‘ visuals, which made for an uncomfortable sensory overload. These included an excess of operatic staging down front, plus a film that transported agonizingly predictable images of suffering, birth and transfiguration into a Los Angeles barrio — a ludicrous companion, in other words, to Sellars’ relocated Magic Flute (on the L.A. freeways, for Glyndebourne), Rake‘s Progress (at an LAPD jailhouse, for Le Chatelet in Paris) and Pelleas et Melisande (in Malibu, for the L.A. Opera). The 100-minute score, deep and rich, draws upon haunting contemporary Latino poetry, interspersed with strange and folklike imagery from several Apocryphal texts — an exercise in eclecticism on Adams’ part so sharply superior to the helter-skelter provenance of the visuals that you had to wonder at their being under the same roof, in the service of the same masterful, accessible music.

Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic have scheduled El Niño for a performance in 2003 shortly after the opening of Disney Hall. The work was recorded by Nonesuch at the Paris premiere in December, and is being rushed into production while it‘s still, in the language of the record industry, “hot.” Naive and Sentimental, also regarded as a “hot” score two years ago at its premiere under Salonen, was recorded here at the time, also by Nonesuch. That release, however, has been postponed until God knows when. Go figure.

Ease of access is not what comes first to mind in considering the music of Yannis Xenakis, who died in Paris last week, at 78. I think first of ferocious energy, of outbursts of sheer kinetic power — propelled in his early works by madcap percussion ensembles, and later by extraordinary, intricate interaction of live and computer-driven forces. I also think of his stature in the world of the arts, the way his expertise at music and at architecture have worked in some pieces to create something truly larger than their parts. Architecture, wrote Goethe, is frozen music; Xenakis applied the blowtorch.

Reviving Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King was the latest of XTET‘s many good deeds. Perhaps this hardy band of local freelance players, founded in 1986, should have been renamed “IXTET Plus Conductor and Stage DirectorDesigner” for its major work on last week’s Monday Evening Concert at the County Museum, but its value over the years is beyond mere counting. More people should have been there — out front, I mean.

Fashions change. I remember two performances of Max Davies‘ (as he prefers to be known) expressionist shocker in my first year in California: one at CalArts and one concocted by Rhonda Kess, an ambitious local mover of fond memory. Now the work has faded from the repertory, and that’s too bad. Could it be that music about madness — as opposed to merely mad music — has become something of a redundancy?

Donald Crockett led the vivid performance at LACMA, with the remarkable John Duykers as the mad George III in bedraggled nightie, howling and keening, galumphing around the stage as he cajoles his imagined pet birds to sing along. There is nothing in the world quite like this lurid fantasy; Schoenberg‘s Pierrot Lunaire figures in its ancestry, as does Boulez’s Le Marteau Sans Maitre, as do all representations of operatic madness from Monteverdi onward. The wit in this piece is devastating; who else but Davies would vouchsafe a foxtrot version of an aria from Handel‘s Messiah? And get away with it? There is also nothing in the world quite like John Duykers, an actorsinger of awesome versatility, from a magnificent command of Baroque drama to Philip Glass’ next opera still on the worktable. (He was also the Mao Tse-tung in John Adams‘ Nixon in China, but, alas, that role doesn’t appear in the set of excerpts that Adams conducts at the Philharmonic this week.)

On the next night, at Susan Svrcek‘s “Piano Spheres” recital at Pasadena’s Neighborhood Church — beautifully played, well attended — it was deja vu all over again, most of all in the ambitious final work, Frederick Lesemann‘s Concerto for Piano and Electronic Tape. The work dates from 1980, commissioned by USC to celebrate its centennial. I heard it then, and found fascination in the interplay between the solo instrument (performed on that occasion by Leonard Stein) and the accompanying tape full of the whiz and whir and bloop-bleep that outsiders at that time referred to as “Star Wars music.” That, we were all sure, was going to be the music of the fertile and rosy future. You could even buy a gadget at Radio Shack, for a mere $500, that could create a believable repertory of those sounds to go along with your live music making. (I had one, and ditched it after about a week.)

Lesemann’s piece was no less strong and imaginative at last week‘s hearing, but it was a relic even so. Electronic music has come far. It’s no longer merely a clever accompaniment that you can peel away from live performance; the magic word nowadays is interaction. To a surprising degree, this work rattled the same bones as two other major scores on Svrcek‘s program: Ferruccio Busoni’s overstuffed, dry-as-dust Fantasia nach Johann Sebastian Bach of 1909, and a Sonata from 1923 by the painfully misguided Russian pseudo-modernist Nikolai Roslavets, a wretched pastiche of Scriabin‘s worst mannerisms. Never mind; a bit of really bad music now and then can do wonders in clearing the air.

It cleared the air, in this case, for an even larger chunk of authentic Scriabin later in the week, a wad of 10 — count ’em — Piano Etudes, performed in what sounded like one breath by the singular young pianist with the singular name of Lang Lang. I was drawn to his UCLA concert, despite the threat of all that Scriabin, by the remarkably listenable way he had delivered a similar horror, the notorious Rach 3, at the Hollywood Bowl last summer.

There‘s something of a musician here, I suspect. It lies hidden at the moment behind a scrim of acquired affectations: the grimaces and winsome smiles, the between-the-notes hand gestures. It hides as well behind a style of music making applied onto the notes from the outside: Chopin’s B-minor Sonata with new dynamics for every phrase, the Brahms G-minor Rhapsody (as encore) pounded to a pulp. At 18, he has much to learn and, apparently, a fair amount to unlearn as well. But the technique is there, and — in the bull-roarings of the Scriabin D-sharp minor Etude and the Balakirev Islamey — you had to stop breathing for a minute or two to take it all in. In the age when freak performers with clever managements can go platinum, it‘s reassuring to be bowled over by some genuine musical promise once in a while.

Terry Riley’s Requiem for Adam, which ended the Kronos Quartet‘s concert at UCLA the weekend before last, is a strong, distinguished work that also represents something of a new direction for Riley. It lasts about 40 minutes, and the second of its three movements is on Kronos Caravan, the group’s latest CD. The Adam is the 16-year-old son of the Kronos‘ David Harrington, who died on Easter Sunday, 1995, while mountain climbing on Mount Diablo. The music — immensely sad and, above all, loving — rises to a frenzied funeral march but settles again to a serene vision. There is a sense of continuity here, stronger than anything else of Riley’s that I know. The first movement unfolds as a set of variations over a simple theme. The progression becomes inexorable; the Bach Chaconne comes inescapably to mind.

The ensuing movements bring on a new jolt; the “Dies Irae” chant mixes into what might be a New Orleans funeral, and the persistent dance rhythms seem as much a celebration of a radiant 16-year-old‘s life as a lament at its termination. At the end I felt wrung out; can brand-new music really have this power?

Yes, it can.

A week that offers both The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni is twice blessed; this happened last week not in Vienna or London, but right here. There were noticeable dissimilarities between the L.A. Opera’s Figaro at the Music Center and UCLA Opera‘s Big Game offering, but not so much as you might think, and certainly not so much as the difference in ticket price — $148 vs. $25 — might suggest.

This is the fourth time around for the L.A. Opera’s production, created by Sir Peter Hall, which the company shares with the Chicago Lyric and which runs here through February 3. Conductor Marco Guidarini delivered the score on opening night in a tidy, nicely balanced, fleet performance. Susanna and the Count and Countess — Maria Bayo, Claudio Otelli and Pamela Armstrong — are newcomers. Richard Bernstein‘s Figaro dates from the 1994 and 1997 revivals, and gets better every time, lithe and witty and remarkably responsive to both the anger and whimsy in the role; he pretty much ran the show on opening night. Bayo’s Susanna, with her big, clear and flexible voice welling up out of her tiny, beguiling presence, would have stolen the show from anyone else.

Armstrong‘s Countess was also a lovely presence, although her ”Porgi amor“ lacked the stab of pain that others have delivered. Otelli’s Count, awash in unpleasantly visible spittle, was something of a stick. The gawky but likable Cherubino was Megan Dey-Toth, who, like Bernstein, is a product of the L.A. Opera‘s apprentice program, one of the company’s most creditable operations. Jonathan Mack, Jamie Offenbach and Cynthia Jansen were their eminently trustworthy selves in minor roles; John Atkins, another company stalwart, takes over as the Count in the last two performances. The two makeweight fourth-act arias for Marcellina and Basilio, which had been included in previous company revivals, were dropped this time, at no loss.

I saw the first of UCLA‘s two Don Giovanni performances, nicely staged on Tom Giamario’s complex set, which included some nifty hellfire at the end. The program book proclaimed a lot of gobbledygook by director Frans Boerlage, to the effect that his production would seek to restore the comedic side of Mozart‘s imponderable masterwork and downplay the tragic. Fortunately, nobody in the cast seemed to have read this or, at least, to have taken it to heart. There was some tampering, however. Elvira’s big aria, ”Mi tradi,“ was moved from late in the opera, where it belongs, to right after Leporello‘s ”Catalogue“ aria, where it made no dramatic sense. (Yes, I know that librettist Lorenzo da Ponte sanctioned that move in his late years, but he was wrong, too.) Boerlage also saw fit to restore the inept comic duet for Leporello and Zerlina, ”Per queste tue manine,“ which Mozart had later tossed in to titillate the Viennese crowd, a blemish on his divinity.

Aside from a bit of horseplay in Act Two that could have taken place on the doorstep of Animal House, the young cast delivered a spirited performance, properly moving at times, well-paced under William Vendice’s musical leadership — a step upward from his bloodless La Boheme at the Music Center last November. I usually hesitate at singling out individual members of student casts, but I will not be surprised to encounter the names of In Joon Jang, the Giovanni, or Duana Demus, the Anna, in future operagoing. My compliments also to Bong-won Kye, the Ottavio, who attempted to emulate John McCormack‘s legendary feat of delivering the cadenzas in ”Il mio tesoro“ in single breaths, and came pretty damn close.

Opera Pacific’s Macbeth, which came between the two Mozart treasures, served to open the Verdi centennial celebration, and did so with distinction, not quite perfect but good enough to pass.

Shakespeare was Verdi‘s dramatic idol and his passion; Macbeth, first created in 1847 and extensively revised 18 years later, was his first requiting of that passion. The extraordinary musical insights of his Otello and Falstaff were not yet at his command; the brassy oom-pahs of his early style take over now and then (notably in the cornball measures as Duncan and his retinue march to their doom, and the big choral numbers wherein Shakespeare’s mere three Witches become a stage-filling chorus). Both the 1847 and 1865 versions have their flaws, and wiser music directors concoct a kind of pastiche from both.

That was John DeMain‘s decision in his Macbeth for Costa Mesa; it wisely did away with the Witches’ ballet, the worst of their scenes, but retained the final music of Macbeth‘s defeat and death from the early version. As happens frequently at Opera Pacific since his accession as artistic director in 1998, DeMain was the evening’s true hero, laying out a spirited, richly colored performance to honor the exuberance of Verdi‘s art while maintaining respect for the composer’s honorable evocation of Shakespeare‘s tragic accents.

In a prevailingly young cast, Richard Paul Fink delivered a resonant portrait of Shakespeare’s doomed hero, although his dramatic baritone seemed occasionally awash in its own juiciness. Cynthia Lawrence had a few shrill moments as his Lady, but exited most appealingly on the famous high D-flat of her ”Sleepwalking“ aria. Eric Owens‘ Banquo and the ringing challenge of Andrew Richards’ Macduff figured among the evening‘s modest stock of genuine vocal treasures. Colin Graham’s production, created originally for Chile‘s Santiago Opera, moved smoothly amid the mobile big black blocks strewn with skeletal bones and other spookeries in Ramon Lopez’s stage designs. The luxuriant tatters of Joel Berlin‘s Witches’ costumes looked just off the boat from Hell, another positive enhancement.

My operatic inundation had actually begun the previous weekend. In San Francisco for John Adams‘ astonishing new El Niño, about which more in a couple of weeks, I also dropped in on the Lamplighters and their current The Gondoliers, sheer delight despite the unaccountable omission of the ”Spark of a swindle“ duet, a most farsighted takeoff on celebrity product endorsements. Tamperings or no, the Lamplighters — now rounding out their 48th season — offer the best Gilbert and Sullivan available in this country. Monroe Kanouse is their music director, whom I last knew half a century ago as a promising Berkeley undergrad; his Gondoliers had the ensemble elegance and clarity of Mozart. The crowd had the expected preponderance of aged-in-wood Savoyards, among whom I reckon myself; still, there were enough smooth young faces in attendance to suggest that this cherishable repertory has a few more years of life — as do we all.