Lou, At Last

The Philharmonic’s final con-cert of the old year began with Lou Harrison‘s Suite for Violin, Piano and Small Orchestra, magic made audible. James DePreist conducted, replacing the indisposed Franz Welser-Most; Robert McDuffie and Christopher Taylor were the soloists. The 10-member performing ensemble looked lost on the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion — before, that is, the music. Then everything became very grand, as Harrison’s music usually does.

This was the first music of Harrison ever to appear on the orchestra‘s regular subscription series: recognition overdue for a much-loved composer, now 83, who has served California’s musical life as long and as graciously as anyone you can name. The suite is early Harrison, written at 34, but the seeds of the later creator are already there: the world-view, the eloquence of simple things simply put and, most of all, the radiant beauty. In a radio series on West Coast music that I concocted in 1981, Harrison was the first one to speak; when I asked him what it meant to be a California composer, he answered, disarmingly and directly, “I suppose it means that you don‘t have to be afraid to be pretty.”

There’s a special kind of beauty in Harrison‘s music, and it goes beyond what mere “prettiness” implies. The best of it meanders on and on, as someone might make up a very personal tune to fill a big empty space — on a mountaintop, say. Matters of greater artifice — regular phrase structure, or the notion of beginning and ending in the same key — assume relatively minor importance. Music and listener become extremely close; a simply harmonized melody, naive at first, has a way of ensnaring you almost before you notice.

The music seems to come at you from everywhere. “Cherish the hybrids” is another famous Harrison watchword. The suite was composed long before Harrison’s first delighted journey to Asia, so its exoticisms — the two movements subtitled “Gamelan,” for example — have a made-up, storybook quality compared to the deeply observed Asianisms of his later works. “A honeyed thunder” is Harrison‘s own description of this haunting, teasing music; at the end, as the final Chorale trails off toward silence, you might also suspect the presence of fireflies.

The Harrison suite shone a beacon light in the celebration of California’s state of the arts that has gone on for the past few months, most notably at the County Museum. I‘ve already dealt with the first two concerts in the museum’s “Focus on California” series, planned with great resource by LACMA‘s music director, Dorrance Stalvey, and, praise be, attended by crowds almost as big as they deserved. The last two in the series, which ended on January 8, were no less interesting and drew equally large turnouts.

December’s program offered a look back on the goings-on at the lively and influential San Francisco Tape Music Center of the 1960s, a creative swirl half-hidden in a creaky old building on Divisadero Street, where fantastic experiments in electronic music, abstract filmmaking, dance and poetry — separate, or sometimes combined — served to draw a timeline across the century. Nothing after the Tape Center was in any way like anything before. On his first visit to S.F. in 1957, Pierre Boulez had brought along the new 10-inch DG LP of Karlheinz Stockhausen‘s Song of the Youths. For a couple of weeks I programmed it several times a day on KPFA. Inflamed by these first tricklings from the electronic studios of West Germany, composers (Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender and Pauline Oliveros), video artists (Tony Martin and the single-named superstar Pablo) and their colleagues set about inventing an entire new artistic language, strange in its sound-sources, wonderfully rich in its lines of juncture. Multimedia was born at the Tape Center; later ventures in combining the arts, including New York’s Electric Circus and Walt Disney‘s wacko dream that eventuated as CalArts, were the direct descendants.

Inevitably, the Tape Center program at LACMA — consisting of multimedia works that had toured to astonished audiences across the U.S. in 1964 — had a touch of the archaic about it, like a display of a wind-up Victrola. But the energy was there, and when all eyes were captured by the video of a younger, svelter Pauline Oliveros meditating into her accordion — the same thing the present-day Pauline did a few months ago in the new-music festival at Beyond Baroque — some message about the timelessness of important art came triumphantly across. Eventually, the spirit of the Tape Center dwindled, not for the reason of poverty that usually besets noble experiments, but because of a big-money foundation grant that required its absorption into aca-deme. Its wings clipped, it oozed into Oakland’s Mills College, where its echoes still resound.

Last week‘s final program captured some of those echoes, since both the performing group — that local icon known as the California EAR Unit — and most of the composers have been entwined with CalArts for part of their respective careers. There was lots of prettiness that night, and also some genuine beauty. Flutes live (Dorothy Stone) and on tape blended in Rand Steiger’s haunting memorial piece For Marnie Dilling; in her Blind Window, Robin Lorentz‘s soft, distanced solo violin melted along with small percussion and Angie Bray’s wisps of video to create a kind of Japanese twilight; Steven Hoey‘s Coloratura, living up to its name, involved the EAR Unit in the whoopee they do better than anyone I know. At the end there was Paul Dresher — not of CalArts, not of the Tape Center, but of kindred spirit as his lush, throbbing Chorale Times Two hovered on the edge of many kinds of music, led this way and that by the urging of his own electric guitar.

“This way and that”: It’s as good a description of California‘s music as you could want.

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Picking Up the Pieces

The year ended with fitting resonance. At Westwood’s St. Paul the Apostle Church, Dana Marsh was back for a last time to lead his boys, men, soloists and Michael Eagan‘s Musica Angelica in one more superb Messiah before embarking for broader horizons; he will be missed. One soloist needs special, ecstatic mention: soprano Alice Gribbin, half-Brithalf-angel. At UCLA’s Royce Hall, Jeffrey Kahane and his L.A. Chamber Orchestra ended the Bach year with a creditable B-minor Mass. I particularly liked his idea of alternating small and large ensembles in some of the big choruses, enhancing both drama and clarity. Other fine noises filled the air at Royce a few days later, as the winners from Placido Domingo‘s Operalia returned for a gala concert to prove that wise judges still exist somewhere in the world, and that opera has nothing to fear from any immediate singer shortage.

The year began and ended with Esa-Pekka Salonen: one Green Umbrella concert of his music in January, to speed him into his sabbatical year, and another in December to reveal the fruits of his labors during that year. The two works — the grit of the orchestral L.A. Variations and the wit of the new piano workout Dichotomie — declare the variety of expressive manner and the versatility of our resident maestro, and, as well, of resident virtuosa Gloria Cheng, who dispatched the latter work in an awesome gloves-on gloves-off performance. In the months between those events, the steelwork went up at the Disney Hall site, substantial assurance of what we in journalism know as ”MORE TK.“

Absent Salonen, the Philharmonic’s year left fewer than usual lingering memories. A succession of Brits lingers the most vividly: the splendid Mark Elder to lead two programs, including a Verdi Requiem eloquent, noble and roof-raising; and the Ojai Festival under Simon Rattle, with rapturous new music by Thomas Ades and Mark Anthony Turnage. In October, there was Benjamin Britten‘s War Requiem, memorably led by Antonio Pappano, with the extraordinary British tenor Ian Bostridge in his local debut. (By the way, I’m about halfway through Bostridge‘s doctoral thesis, Witchcraft and Its Transformations, published by Oxford. It’s not as much fun as the Harry Potter books, but no less informative.) On the other hand, Sir Roger Norrington‘s revival of Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time, music praised around 1940 for its agitprop bravery, merely proclaimed the greater wisdom in according sleeping dogs a wide berth.

The Los Angeles Opera, in its changing-of-the-guard year, also fared well on Britten‘s shores, with a Billy Budd as a seaworthy ending to Peter Hemmings’ reign and a Peter Grimes among the first bright lights of the Domingo era. The long-overdue Aida, which began that era, went only partway toward ending the famine, while the recent drab revival of La Boheme underlined the fact that new managements can‘t always change things overnight. The best of opera last year lay more in the portents than the actuality: smashing news from the Domingo camp about the future (a George Lucas Ring, superpatron Alberto Vilar’s millions, the names of Kent Nagano and Valery Gergiev aglow on the conductors‘ roster, the wealth of promise among the Operalia singers). There was grand opera elsewhere as well, an Ariadne auf Naxos at Marilyn Horne’s Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, and the Long Beach Opera‘s exhumations of opera old and almost-new: Jacopo Peri’s Euridice of 1600 and Luigi Dallapiccola‘s Volo di Notte of 1940.

To the County Museum, out of Italy, came a hitherto unknown pianist named Marino Formenti, for whom four killer 20th-century programs — including Jean Barraque’s Sonata, the Great White Shark of piano music — held no terrors. (He returns for three more programs next month.) George Crumb, whose music for no sensible reason languishes half-forgotten nowadays, was properly honored at a Green Umbrella concert, and got to charm another large audience at one of the Philharmonic‘s valuable but now discontinued (why?) Sunday-morning QA-plus-pastry sessions. Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 5 — a work hailed in some quarters as the cat‘s pajamas of all apocalypses, but in others as the kind of thing that gives self-indulgence a bad name — opened the Orange County Philharmonic’s Eclectic Orange festival. The Orange folk found better ways to affix their much-maligned county to the cultural map: Bostridge in a Schubert-Wolf program in exactly the right small space for lieder recitals; Mikel Rouse in another of his multimedia almost-operas; and, earlier in the year, a Bach program conducted by Jordi Savall, as satisfying as any entry in that composer‘s anniversary year.

Of all the movers and shakers I’ve had to deal with, Teresa (”Tracey“) Sterne was the one I found it hardest to say ”no“ to. The last time I tried (and failed) was in New York on January 31, 1986; I remember the date because it was Schubert‘s birthday. Tracey cajoled me into coming to a Schubert program at Symphony Space to hear some new singer she’d discovered. The singer was Dawn Upshaw. Fifteen years later, I can still hear every note of that concert.

Tracey died last month, after years of battle with the one enemy, Lou Gehrig‘s disease, she couldn’t outtalk. In her great years she headed — no, actually, she invented — Nonesuch Records, a label that gave us new music (Cage, Crumb, Babbitt, Subotnick), old music lovingly restored (American ballroom songs, ragtime, Stephen Foster), world music recorded at the site, Bach cantatas led by unknowns (the excellent Karl Ristenpart). The artwork was worth hanging on the wall; the jacket notes assumed that you‘d be listening with brains as well as hormones. While other LPs sold for $5.95, Nonesuch went for $2.98.

Every record company has someone in charge who watches sales charts and sees to it that the slow items — chamber music, say, or Cage — get dropped at the end of the month. A very few in the annals of recording seem to understand, and work to preserve, the artistic value of their product. Goddard Lieberson at Columbia showed the way in the ’50s; today‘s small list of survivors includes Manfred Eicher, the ”E“ of ECM; Bob Hurwitz, who still keeps the Nonesuch name flying above its corporate ownership; and brave souls at hole-in-the-wall ventures like New Albion, Mode and Bridge. Lieberson recorded new American music in the 1950s and financed that side of his catalog with Kostelanetz and show tunes; Tracey Sterne came on the scene in 1965. The two-disc Nonesuch tribute that Hurwitz put together in time for Tracey to know about it has some of her not-bad performances as a teenage pianist, and a sampling of her achievements as a record producer. Most of the latter remains in the catalog, reprocessed to CD. Her monument endures.

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The Barefoot Boy at 50

Paul Dresher turns 50 on January 8 and plans to celebrate in his favorite way, surrounded by other musicians on a stage. Specifically, he will join the California EAR Unit at LACMA, in the last of the museum‘s “Focus on California” concerts, to take part in his Chorale Times Two on a program that also includes music by composers Steve Hoey, Michael Fink, Nick Chase, Rand Steiger and Amy Knoles.

Fifty! It seems like only yesterday — but obviously wasn’t — that the lanky kid from the Palisades sat in the cockpit of an electronic console of his own devising, working the keyboards, taking an occasional whack at an electric guitar and wandering barefoot over the pedals. Liquid and Stellar Music was his big solo piece in 1981, and he took it around the world: passionate great globs of sound, wonderful to hear and to watch. The minimalists were riding high in those days: Glass, Reich and Adams. Was Dresher part of that scene?

“Think of me more as a pre-maximalist,” he says.

A few wrinkles and a few pounds later, Dresher escorts me with pride through his last few years and through his studio-workshop in a made-over West Oakland warehouse, near where the grass now grows on the site of the 1989 freeway collapse. His piece for LACMA is actually the second part of a longer work for solo violin and “electro-acoustic band”; the EAR Unit‘s Robin Lorentz will be soloist. Dresher will also participate, not on one of his famous electronic inventions, but on a good old down-to-earth electric guitar.

Dresher’s best-known music has been involved with theater, in one way or another, starting with his multimedia collaborations with George Coates (seeHear and areare, with their fabulous light-show effects) and moving on to his work with the unique performance artist Rinde Eckert. Slow Fire, the best-known of the Eckert pieces (available on video), maintains its energy, a chilling pageant of post-Vietnam Middle American values and the mindless terrorists they can produce. So do the later theatrical pieces, most of them produced here at Royce Hall over the years, e.g., Power Failure, a bitter satire, and Pioneer, which, says Dresher, “contains something here and there to offend almost everyone.”

Chorale Times Two represents something of a new direction for Dresher. “Most of my music up to now has been contrapuntal, in one way or another,” he says. “But recently I‘ve been re-studying Bach’s chorale harmonizations, which produce marvelous harmonic progressions while the inner voices move contrapuntally. This new piece doesn‘t sound like Bach, of course, but its big melodic arches take shape over a continuous unfolding harmony, and that’s something new for me. I‘ve been thinking a lot about the human voice and how to use its real singing power, something you don’t find much in my old theater pieces.

”From there I‘ve also been thinking about music for solo instruments. [San Francisco violinist] David Abel has had a big influence on me, the way his instrument sings and the meticulousness with which he prepares everything. He warned me against composing real concertos for a soloist and orchestra, because symphony orchestras never get the time to rehearse new music, so I wrote this new piece for violinist and my own Paul Dresher Ensemble. Now I’m working on a cello concerto for Joan Jeanrenaud, who‘s had a busy life since she left the Kronos Quartet. But that’ll also be with the Ensemble; we‘ll do it at Stanford in February.“

The workshop is a vast room permeated with the spirit of invention. Dresher directs me first to a flat strung instrument resting on sawhorses. In elementary physics you learn about the monochord, a single stretched string perhaps 2 feet long and mounted on a frame, which can be divided in exact ratios to demonstrate the overtone series. Dresher’s ”quadrachord“ is 14 feet long, and there are four strings instead of one: two of steel, two of phosphor bronze. A bass pickup sits next to both bridges, to feed their sound into amplification. ”With strings this long,“ says Dresher, ”I can divide them so exactly that I can produce up to the 24th overtone, instead of the seventh or eighth.“ He goes at the strings with a bass-viol bow; the whole room resonates. We are in the realm of ”pure“ intonation, not the set of compromises that form the normal tuning of familiar Western music. The effect is weird and unsettling, but more and more composers are devising ways of using these sounds. ”What I can do with this,“ says Dresher, ”is allow composers to come here, sample these harmonies and work with them at home, without having to lug 14-foot instruments around.“

He has another trick. He inserts two lengths of threaded half-inch steel rod across the strings and strikes them with a small steel rod. Wow! The sound is overpowering, huge and rich. Dresher walks over to the opposite wall, where other strings are stretched over 55 feet. Again, it‘s not the sort of instrument you’d carry to a gig; once again, however, the sounds themselves are portable via sampling, and they‘ll shake your spine. They end up in a tube amplifier that Dresher picked up at a yard sale for $10. The controls are dirty, and the static roars until the tubes warm up, but, as Dresher or any other sound aficionado will tell you, the tones are pure.

At one end of the room looms a giant A-shaped structure, 18 feet high, with a platform about halfway up as the crossbar of the ”A.“ A frame is attached to the lower end of the ”A,“ with several strings running vertically from tuning pegs. In front of all this hangs a 17-foot pendulum, a metal tube in several sections, attached to a pivot on top and with a weight at the bottom. Dresher pulls up the pendulum and releases it; there’s a plectrum on the back of it that strums across the strings. For the next 10 minutes or so, the pendulum‘s arc ever so gradually lessens, with the ostinato of plucked-string tone also slowing imperceptibly. Even in that messed-up workroom the effect is spellbinding; in a performance space it would surely be even more so.

”The beauty of this whatever-you-want-to-call-it,“ says Dresher, ”is the way it becomes its own kind of theater. There’s the pendulum, for starters. Then there are these platforms. You could, for instance, have a bass clarinetist standing halfway up — that, by the way, has become my favorite acoustic instrument, for its amazing variety of tone — or a dancer; they could work with the rhythm of the pendulum, or against it. Also, this whole thing breaks down, so you can get it onto a truck with no problem. I‘ll be taking it to Minneapolis for the premiere of a new piece, Soundstage, in June.

“When I was studying at UC San Diego in the 1970s, Harry Partch’s instruments were still around, and Harry too, in spirit anyhow. I was amazed by the audacity of this man, building the instruments that freed him from all the harmonic traditions of Western music. Then I worked with Bob Erickson, who was also always inventing. Those stroked steel rods that he used, for example; are they still around? People should be composing for them all the time.

”For me, music and theater have always been the same. All my life, I‘ve been dreaming up instruments and then building them. I build the instruments first, and then I find the music that’s in them and help it escape.“

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Franz Among Friends

It’s not pleasant, witnessing the gradual retreat of the classical-record industry from artistic significance to blandness and the spread of the notion that serious music won‘t hurt you if you don’t listen too hard. Retreads predominate: Romantico Domingo, The Ultimate Mozart Album, The Greatest Classical Show on Earth. Promising projects are begun, then abandoned midway: Sony‘s Ligeti project with Esa-Pekka Salonen, for example.

It’s a privilege as well as a shock to report, therefore, the completion of one project that, on its own, suggests that it‘s still possible to take the recording industry seriously, and to suspect that, in some corners, there remains a belief in a buying public with taste, brains and curiosity. A couple of months ago, the British label Hyperion, whose products are distributed in this country by Harmonia Mundi, completed its recording of the entire song literature of Franz Schubert. Volume 37, the final disc, is devoted to songs of Schubert’s last year, but that doesn‘t mean that the entire series, consisting of over 750 separate entries, runs in chronological order. One of the remarkable aspects of the series, in fact, is the variety of intelligence expended in organizing each disc. You may not want to spend something like 50 consecutive hours with Schubert’s total song output, but if you did you would not be bored.

The intelligence is that of Graham Johnson, who organized the order of events, chose the appropriate singers (Brits mostly, but not entirely) for each song, accompanied every performance at the piano, and wrote 37 sets of exhaustive program notes — in booklets running as long as 100 pages each — that, by themselves, constitute a landmark of writing about music out of love, scholarship and evangelical ardor. (A Schubert scholar myself, with a thesis to prove it, I write those last words out of awe and undisguised envy.) Several of the volumes run chronologically — ”The Young Schubert,“ ”The Final Year,“ etc. Some attempt to re-create the ”Schubertiades,“ the famous informal gatherings of Schubert adorers where poets gathered, songs were sung, and intelligent conversation ran thick and fast. The series includes an ”1815 Schubertiade“ and a ”Goethe Schubertiade,“ although the great poet-philosopher never attended one in person. (In the final set of notes, Johnson wittily imagines a mutual-admiration meeting between composer and poet. It takes place a few years after Schubert‘s actual death and shortly before Goethe’s.) Most rewarding are the volumes arranged around themes: a collection of water songs, a nocturnal set, and one about visions of Death and Heaven that begins with the harrowing ”Tod und das Madchen“ and ends with a serene, angelic ”Seligkeit“ that sends you off onto your own Cloud Nine.

Schubert‘s reputation is on the rise. The rediscovered, reconstructed ”deathbed“ symphony (No. 10 in some reckonings), with its haunting, bleak slow movement, heightens the sense of loss in his death at 31. Mitsuko Uchida’s new Philips recordings of his sonatas and impromptus are awesomely beautiful. I envy anyone first discovering — preferably in the Emersons‘ recording on DG — the astonishing icy grandeur of the G-major, the last of the string quartets. Even so, it is the songs that define Schubert the best, and can move us the most by our just thinking about them. As the church cantatas for Bach, as the late piano concertos for Mozart, the confluence of Schubert and poetry — even bad poetry so long as it also possessed a soul — produced an art whose closeness to humanness leaves mere verbal description futile. Something happens inside all of us when the Boy cries out in terror at the Erlking’s caress; when the Young Nun finds solace in a glimpse of heaven; when, across the still landscape of Night and Dreams, the harmony suddenly drops to some other realm and we lose a breath.

Johnson‘s zeal fills these discs remarkably well. Everything is here: fragments of songs left unfinished for one reason or another; poems that Schubert set more than once, sometimes years apart; part songs for several voices with piano; interesting oddities. A set of pretty, wordless vocal exercises bears witness that Schubert earned a few shillings now and then giving voice lessons. A bullying letter from the poet Matthaus Collin to his cousin Joseph Spaun (”Why do you never write . . .?“) is transformed by Schubert into a parody of Italian operatic recitative. ”Der Hochzeitbraten“ for three voices with piano accompaniment is a hilarious small scene celebrating a rural wedding feast. A duet for soprano and bass by the 17-year-old Schubert, to a text from Goethe’s Faust, points toward a career in opera that, alas, never got off the ground.

Not all of Johnson‘s singers are elegant vocal technicians, but most are; the list includes such luminaries as Thomas Hampson, Elly Ameling, Lucia Popp and Thomas Allen. Even among the ever-so-slightly-lesser lights, the level is remarkably high, and it’s obvious through the entire ensemble that Johnson‘s presence at the piano becomes the major shaping force. And there are wonderful performances: Ian Bostridge, participating at the very start of his career, will wring your heart with Die schone Mullerin, which gleans an extra thread of gold as the veteran Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who owned this music in his time, comes on to read the verses. Among the German singers, Matthias Goerne’s Winterreise is superb, and the great tenor Peter Schreier delivers one of my favorite less-known songs, ”Auf der Bruck,“ with glorious hammer strokes. Brigitte Fassbaender has the entire ”Death and Heaven“ disc to herself, and delivers a devastating ”Tod und das Madchen“ at the start. One disappointment: That delightful piece with the clarinet and the yodeling, ”Der Hirt auf dem Felsen,“ should have been on the ”Last Years“ collection. It had, however, been sung by Arleen Auger, rather heavily, on an earlier disc.

The series began with Janet Baker‘s singing of ”Der Jungling am Bache,“ a song from Schubert’s 15th year — full of ”youthful ardor and innocence,“ says Graham Johnson‘s note. It ends with Anthony Rolfe Johnson’s singing of ”Die Taubenpost“ from 16 years later. ”This blend of happiness and wistfulness,“ writes Graham Johnson, ”sets the seal, gently and without ceremony, on a composer‘s entire songwriting career, indeed his entire creative life.“ It is generally reckoned as Schubert’s last song, completed in October 1828. One month later, its composer was dead.

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Roll Call

Over two recent weeks I heard 14 works by composers of the century just ended (or just ending, if you’re one of those), spread through six programs. Herewith, a slightly out-of-breath report on these concerts, in reverse chronological order.

December 7: Peter Serkin is soloist, with Christoph Eschenbach and the Philharmonic, in Peter Lieberson‘s The Red Garuda, a 25-minute piano concerto, tone poem with piano, neither or both, named after a bird in Buddhist mythology that flies and never stops. I want to like it, if only because Lieberson’s father, record producer Goddard, was one of the industry‘s true heroes, but I cannot. Turgid in texture, its emotion delivered as a kind of screeching (think bad Scriabin), the work needed (and, fortunately, got) a Mozart concerto afterward to clear the air. Guess which deserved, and drew, the most applause.

December 5: Donald Crockett’s excellent Thornton Contemporary Music Ensemble at USC introduces Naomi Sekiya‘s nicely energetic Arachnid Dance for guitar and strings, two works by Uzbekistan-born Australian Elena Kats-Chernin, and some time-wasting stuff by Gerald Levinson (whose deplorable Second Symphony, played here in 1995, left scars not yet healed). Kats-Chernin’s Clocks runs a fantastic array of audible color (percussion, brass, a saxophone) over an insistent metronomic banging; even better are some of her ragtime pieces that Vicki Ray played at the last ”Piano Spheres“ concert.

December 4: Esa-Pekka Salonen‘s Dichotomie, one of the products of his sabbatical from the Philharmonic podium, draws a capacity crowd to Zipper for the season’s second ”Green Umbrella,“ but Jonathan Harvey‘s Song Offerings is even more worth the trip: settings of misty Tagore poetry with a solo voice (the marvelous Elissa Johnston) engulfed in radiance from the Steven Stucky–led chamber ensemble’s microtones and distant showers of sparks. Salonen‘s 19-minute piece, two movements of pianistic glitter — Ravel here, John Adams’ Phrygian Gates there — is slight of substance against, say, the L.A. Variations, but enormously attractive, and is gorgeously played by Gloria Cheng (using half-gloves some of the time to enable palm-of-the-hand glissandos). Lou Harrison‘s Grand Duo, which began the program, would have given off more charm at half the length. Harry Partch’s Barstow gained nothing from string players and baritone John Schneider in hobo attire: the wrong music in the wrong setting.

November 30, December 3: In an interesting coincidence, the two works that bracket Kurt Weill‘s mid-career crisis are given here back to back, the ballet-with-song The Seven Deadly Sins of 1934 — his last European work (and his last collaboration with Bertolt Brecht) — and The Eternal Road, the biblicalpolitical pageant that brought him to New York to work on Max Reinhardt’s 1937 Broadway production. Still afizz from their Mahler the week before, Zubin Mehta and the Philharmonic deliver the Sins in a smashing, eloquent reading of Weill‘s purple orchestration, with the winds playing — as required — as if with garlic on their breath. Sheri Greenawald’s in-your-face delivery is a little overwrought for Brecht‘s slashing satire, but the guys of the Hudson Shad Quartet steal the show. Pre-concert, they had sung, enchantingly, a half-hour of Weill’s theater music.

At Brentwood‘s University Synagogue, with its iffy acoustics, the enterprising Noreen Green and her Los Angeles Jewish Symphony produce more than an hour’s worth of Weill‘s hauntingly beautiful Eternal Road music, its first hearing here since a Hollywood Bowl performance led by Franz Waxman over 50 years ago. It comes over despite some woolly work from an overlarge chorus and despite Green’s own not-quite-eloquent translation of Franz Werfel‘s German text. (Among the LAJS’s previous accomplishments, I‘m told: Handel’s Judas Maccabeus in Yiddish.) Onstage as between-the-scenes narrator there‘s the veteran actor Dick Van Patten, who as Dickie Van Patten had played the boy Isaac in the 1937 original: a nice existential touch.

November 27: LACMA’s second ”Focus on California“ concert honors the refugees who turned the area into a German cultural colony (complete with its own pastry shop, Benes on West Third, which endures). There was nothing the least bit warmed by the local sun in Hanns Eisler‘s 1943 Third Piano Sonata, which Leonard Stein played earnestly; how could there be, when Eisler’s only truly California-inspired work was a set of songs vividly detailing his hatred for the place? Schoenberg‘s String Trio of 1945, his last major 12-tone work and as eloquent a statement as any of the expressive power of that style, could have taken shape in pre-Hitler Berlin. Ernst Krenek’s Aulokithara of 1971, originally composed for oboe, harp and orchestra, and dolled up a year later by transferring the orchestral accompaniment to what passed for electronic sounds (”whoosh-whoosh, plink-plank“) at the time, could have been anyone‘s overextended academic exercise, anywhere in the world, anytime from 1930 on. That leaves Ingolf Dahl’s 1946 Concerto a Tre as the evening‘s one unmitigated charmer, as though old Benes himself had been standing at the door handing out his renowned Apfelstrudel. Another delight is the high quality of performance, from the iconic Stein; the string players Maiko Kawabata, David Walther and William Skeen; David Sherr (ambulating through Krenek’s prescribed stageful of oboes in a vain search for interesting music); harpist Amy Wilkins; and the smiling clarinetist Gary Gray, whose smile rubs off onto Dahl‘s piece and becomes a positive gleam.

Meanwhile, back on Bunker Hill: An audience’s collective tear ducts in the fourth act are the sure-fire litmus for any La Boheme performance; on opening night, from a well-located seat in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, I detect nary a sniffle. The Herbert Ross production, first seen in 1993, is especially admirable for the way it leaves room for a properly chosen cast to behave as recognizable human participants in a human drama. No such luck this time, however. The idea may have been a good one, to cast the opera with young unknowns, but we get a shrill, squally Rodolfo in Aquiles Machado, tenor-shaped in the blobby, old-fashioned way so that Herb Ross‘ plan for his fourth-act entrance, riding a bicycle, is out of the question. (He merely pushes it on.)

Leontina Vaduva’s Mimi lacks spirit, tone or even proper respect for pitch — fashioned, in other words, from the same tattered fabric as her Marguerite in last season‘s Faust. Earle Patriarco’s Marcello, a company debut, also seems cut from common cloth; Eric Owens‘ Colline and Malcolm MacKenzie’s Schaunard are, so to speak, just there. That leaves Inva Mula‘s Musetta to steal hearts and, indeed, the whole show — as she had in the 1997 revival — during her few moments onstage, and to make at least those moments worth the $148 that the company believes such second-rate entertainment should be garnering at the box office. On the podium is William Vendice, the company’s chorus master and head of musical staff — but hardly the torchbearer to make these proceedings burst into flame. Placido Domingo, an old and trustworthy Boheme hand, will conduct this weekend‘s performance (December 16 matinee). That has to be an improvement.

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Pianissimo

AndrAs Schiff began his recent Philharmonic stint with Bach‘s D-minor Concerto, seated at the keyboard of a 9-foot concert grand piano with the lid removed, conducting a properly small contingent of string players. I’ve been around long enough to remember when Bach on the concert grand was seen as an unpardonable anachronism. That it is no longer the case stands as testimony to the sublime intelligence of today‘s generation of Bach performers — Schiff and Murray Perahia above all — and, of course, to their immediate ancestor, Glenn Gould. It also stands as further proof of the constantly growing awareness that the overwhelming strengths in Bach’s music transcend their time and speak eloquently into today‘s ears.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I‘ve heard this particular concerto, in its various metamorphoses. It exists in the familiar version for harpsichord, in a speculative reconstruction to bolster the theory that it was originally a work for violin, and — most amazing — in Bach’s own recycling of the first two movements as part of his Cantata No. 146 (”Wir mussen durch viel Trubsal“), where the already-complex slow movement, in a broader orchestration including organ solo, serves as accompaniment to an added-on four-part chorus. It‘s an extraordinary work in any form, an ongoing dialogue between soloist and orchestra, starting out in each of the three movements with separate and distinctive melodic material and eventually arriving at a convincing compromise. This is the same kind of wordless drama that you find in the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto; Bach, some 80 years before, works the trick not once but three times. Hearing the work with piano, in Schiff‘s nicely paced, eloquent, balanced performance, made us aware of this relationship, and by doing so added a further measure to our wonderment at the self-regenerative power of Bach’s music.

Bach on the piano goes far back in history. Franz Liszt and Ferruccio Busoni rewrote many of the keyboard works to the taste of the romantic-minded pianist, with octave doublings to bring the sonorities up to a sexy roar. Even after Wanda Landowska‘s efforts to restore the ”authentic“ sound of the harpsichord — which she accomplished on an oversize, overclangorous instrument and with a rubato that Chopin might have admired — there were responsible, scholarly pianists, Artur Schnabel and Edwin Fischer notably, who honored the timelessness of Bach’s music by performing it on their chosen instrument.

Fischer‘s performance of the complete Well-Tempered Clavier, recorded in England in 1933-34, is now available as part of a large-scale and admirable reissue program, on Naxos and therefore dirt-cheap. A landmark in its time (yes, I was there) and obviously stemming from the noblest intentions, Fischer’s Bach recordings strike me today as anachronistic in a way similar to Landowska‘s. He is obviously aware that he is playing the ”wrong“ instrument, and seems reluctant to allow his piano to identify itself. This I hear as an objectivity that dulls the edge of some of the most powerful parts of this amazing compendium: the C-sharp minor Fugue in Book I, or the E-flat minor Prelude a few pages later. Now there is a Schiff recording of the WTC; as with his Bach performance here with the Philharmonic, it fulfills the music.

Schiff’s program included the Beethoven ”Emperor“ Concerto, also conducted from the keyboard facing into the orchestra. This was not as successful; it bore witness to Schiff as a great pianist in the process of metamorphosing into a conductor, but not there yet. Conducting the ”Emperor“ requires a lot more reaching out toward the orchestra than leaning into Bach‘s modest string ensemble, and some of Schiff’s gesticulations were slightly on the ludicrous side. His Teldec recording, with Bernard Haitink conducting, has a lot more to say about this grand score.

In between came Haydn‘s Symphony No. 95, with Schiff erect, standing on the podium with this splendid, quirky, surprise-filled music fully in hand. Why is this one symphony, from among the magnificent final 12, so seldom played? Does its being in a minor key — the same key as the Mahler Second — frighten small children (see below)? The tricks are plentiful, and they are vintage Haydn: the sudden, jagged silences in the first movement and again in the third; the bits of concerto here and there, especially the cello solos in the minuet. It’s all marvelous music, as Schiff seemed to agree.

That annual big bang known as Mehta‘s Mahler rattled the rafters in Mrs. Chandler’s Pavilion this past weekend, and a mostly rapturous crowd countered noise with noise at the end. The Mahler Second is one of music‘s great playgrounds: swings, merry-go-rounds, seesaws, a jungle gym and a lively zoo. Lenny showed us the way in; Zubi is the current groundskeeper.

You can, of course, put over the Mahler Second as serious music; Bruno Walter’s old recording does pretty well at that, and so do the performances under Haitink and Klaus Tennstedt, both currently out of print. But why bother when the LennyZubi approach, with Mahler‘s wide mood swings made wider, and the second movement’s whipped cream turned into a veritable slurp fest, can sweep a crowd to its feet? Ideally, the Second belongs outdoors; I‘ll never believe that Mahler, most prescient of composers, didn’t actually have the Hollywood Bowl in mind when he wrote the thing back in 1894. All that offstage brass and timpani in the last movement, which resounds so wondrously among the trees in Cahuenga Pass, sounded lost backstage in the Pavilion.

Seriously, Mehta‘s Mahler wasn’t all that bad this time around. He started off in an onslaught that could strike fear into small children — and which did exactly that on Friday night, until the little screamer (seated, would you believe, in the front row) was forcibly removed after the third or fourth howl. Mehta whipped the second-movement cream to just the right consistency, with a nice control over sliding strings and burbling winds. Mezzo-soprano Mary Phillips got a fine, dark tone into her fourth-movement solo; Heidi Grant Murphy‘s brief soprano solos were truly radiant, and I could have sworn that I actually picked out a word or two in the Master Chorale’s final chorus. Maybe, however, it was simply the gods of no-brain music, assuring me it would soon be over.

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All-American

By accident or design, the past few days‘ musical offerings added up to an impressive sweep through a varied American music — a festival in everything but name. Famous antagonists — Aaron Copland and John Cage, say — came onto programs within hissing distance of one another. Henry Cowell and Terry Riley held hands across the decades. A nation that could spawn In C and A Lincoln Portrait has to command respect.

There was Copland aplenty around the actual date (November 14) of his centennial, and a Pacific Symphony concert at the Orange County Performing Arts Center suggested that there were entries still to be discovered in the legacy of this greatly admired American icon. One of these was the score to a forgotten (and forgettable) 1939 film, produced for the New York World’s Fair, called The City — one of those better-life-is-yet-to-come documentaries indigenous to world‘s fairs — in which a bloviating narration went tsk-tsk across scenes of urban blight and foretold a glowing future with grassy expanses and geometrically perfect housing clusters resembling nothing so much as present-day Irvine. At Costa Mesa the original track was suppressed, the narration done live (by Dakin Matthews, an expert bloviator), and the score delivered in excellent sync by Carl St. Clair and the orchestra. I don’t see a shred of this music listed in Schwann, but it is a rich, strong half-hour of prime Copland, with a nice sardonic undertone that suggests that Copland, if obliged to live in an Irvine tract, would have spent time longing for the old days in the Brooklyn slums.

The Pacific Symphony program also had the grand old William Warfield to deliver the words of the Lincoln Portrait, reminder of a time when presidential eloquence had a heartfelt throb that might shame any current practitioner, with Copland‘s music familiar but no less stirring for that. Two nights later the Long Beach Symphony took on the Third Symphony, Copland’s most expansive nonvocal work, lumpy at times — which the wise and bouncy performance under David Loebel did not completely hide — but truly grandiose in its final pages. Loebel is one of this year‘s roster of hopeful conductors ”auditioning“ for the Long Beach podium: a worthy contender and, by the way, a superb pre-concert speaker. This program also included the Khachaturian Violin Concerto, manfully grappled with by the young Howard Zhang but a work long overdue at the dumpster.

Once again, as a year ago, the smartly conceived Eclectic Orange program included one of the hard-to-define, almost-operatic, close-to-magnificent stage works of near genius Mikel Rouse. Failing Kansas is actually the first of the trilogy of multimedia works of which Dennis Cleveland, heard here last season, is the second. This time Rouse was alone in the enveloping black box of Costa Mesa’s Founders Hall. On the screen was Cliff Baldwin‘s collage of images: themes of travel, fugitives on the lam, crime and punishment somehow interwoven to relate to Truman Capote’s ”nonfiction novel“ In Cold Blood. Out front Rouse sang, spoke, played his harmonica, all in near darkness; a further collage of voices moved in and out. Somehow, you grasped the shape of a tormented drama unfolding with irresistible force. Leaving, you passed the Performing Arts Center‘s main hall, where Mozart’s Magic Flute held the stage — delightfully, I‘m told. That work, too, demands a certain suspension of disbelief. Both works bring together sight, sound, music and words, and arrive onto an artistic level far beyond any of its parts.

Meanwhile, back up north, the County Museum’s Monday Evening series was made further irresistible by a visit from Steven Schick‘s UC San Diego percussion ensemble that calls itself red fish blue fish and can whale the daylights out of a stageful of noisemaking apparatus like you never heard. They brought an ancestral program: Henry Cowell’s amazing Ostinato Pianissimo of 1934, from whose steady, soft tick-tock dozens of later composers gleaned sustenance; the first of John Cage‘s ”Construction“ pieces, from five years later, deriving music out of thunder sheets, brake drums and the like; and a Lou Harrison concerto from 1959, in which a very European-sounding violin solo (played by Janos Negyesy as if in a Budapest cafe) rides above a very Indonesian-sounding percussion ensemble. At the end there came Terry Riley’s In C of 1964 — progenitor of and, somehow, participant in everything in music since its time. The performance ran 55 minutes, beautifully paced and — in the way changes of timbre seemed to highlight major divisions — unusually successful in projecting a sense of overall structure. I heard the work this time, as I haven‘t always, more as a masterpiece than as merely a trick.

At UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall (as it is once again known, after the school‘s wacko renaming excursion), Boston’s excellent young Borromeo String Quartet brought in Steve Mackey‘s Ars Moriendi, nine connected movements dealing in an abstract sense with dying, brought into being by Mackey’s own experience at his dying father‘s bedside. Such circumstances should disarm criticism, I suppose, but cannot in this case. Mackey’s 25-minute work, with all its evocative movement titles and with all the benevolence that may have actually guided his pen, is horrendously, offensively dull. So dull it was, in fact, that the murk and turgidity of the ensuing work, Brahms‘ F-minor Piano Quintet, with Christopher O’Riley as the fifth wheel, seemed like a Maypole dance by contrast.

Then there was Peter Schickele‘s new Cello Concerto, bearing the subtitle ”In Memoriam FDR“ and commissioned by the New Heritage Music Foundation, whose aim is to create a repertory of works in the spirit of major American figures or events. Paul Tobias, the foundation’s head and an excellent cellist, was the soloist; Jorge Mester, a longtime collaborator under both the P.D.Q. Bach and Schickele-the-Serious hats, conducted his excellent Pasadena Symphony. Roosevelt himself is a minor player in the work, which is probably just as well, since ”Home on the Range“ was reported to be his favorite tune. Instead, Schickele has created an audible counterpart of a Thomas Hart Benton mural, a brightly colored collage of sounds and tunes from the Roosevelt era, ranging as far afield as Richard Rodgers‘ ”Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered“ and the mood cut short with a final funeral march. Academic and determinedly middle-road, Schickele’s serious music is out to please and does so nicely. Those who deplore the recent downgrading of his activities under his other hat can take solace in the news Schickele slipped to me at lunch that the illustrious P.D.Q. has composed a string quartet, whose world premiere is imminent. Watch the skies.

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Birthday Boy

Conventional wisdom about Aaron Copland is that he is America‘s best “serious” composer so far. Already, however, we’re in trouble; that term “serious” is part of the arts vocabulary rendered meaningless by contemporary realities. What, for example, is the current workable antonym of “serious,” at a time when the music of Gershwin, Ellington — even Bernstein, Coltrane and the Beatles — shows up in scholarly articles and Ph.D. seminars? Let‘s leave it at this, however shaky the ground: Aaron Copland has composed the best American music (so far, please remember) principally aimed at performance in concert halls and opera houses where audiences listen in silence and applaud (or cheer, or boo) only at the end. You notice I didn’t say “greatest.”

He is very much of a presence these days, since his 100th birthday occurs this week. (Among this year‘s anniversary guys, Bach has also fared well; Ernst Krenek and Kurt Weill less well.) Before last week’s Philharmonic concert — an event rendered vivid by the leadership of associate conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya — there was a panel on Copland‘s music in which all the familiar terms were trotted out: modernist, populist, atonal, crossover. Attempts were made to cram Copland’s 70 or so creative years into pigeonholes: the Americana stuff of the ‘40s as retribution for the dissonances of earlier days, the 12-tone stuff of the ’60s as the forgivable sins of old age.

It doesn‘t quite work that way. Part of the marvel of Copland is the central body of style he developed in his early days, built upon with the inventions and insights of later times but never consciously abandoned. The Philharmonic concert included the Symphonic Ode, which Copland composed in 1927–29 and cleaned up in a few orchestral details in 1955: a big work in several sections, for large orchestra. It is generally regarded as a relic of Copland’s bad-boy early days, although other works from the time, the jazz-permeated Piano Concerto and Music for the Theatre — which I‘ll get to in a minute — are anything but bad. The Ode is not, in truth, a work on a level with those two masterpieces; it is, among other things, too long for its length. What struck me, however, was how full this journeyman work was of later, better-known Copland: the throbbing strings and syncopated explosions, for example, that clearly foreshadowed a most unlikely progeny, El Salon Mexico.

The Philharmonic program also included smaller, later Copland: a suite of excerpts from his film scores, wispy until the final segment, the “Threshing Machines” episode from Of Mice and Men, which is what everyone who remembers the film at all remembers best; and five of the Old American Songs nicely sung by Grant Youngblood without the cuteness some singers feel obliged to invoke (e.g., at the Hollywood Bowl last summer). It ended with Appalachian Spring — not the 35-minute ballet in its original scoring for the 15-member pit band that was all Martha Graham could afford at the time, but the 22-minute orchestral suite that Copland, in his wisdom, drew from the whole work and refashioned for concert use. If there is other music that better translates simple, unsophisticated joyousness, I haven’t come across it. If there is a more convincing testimonial to the power of pure diatonic harmony to bring tears to the eyes of a hard-boiled critic, sitting among cell phones and a heavy-breathing concert audience, than the final minutes of this music, I haven‘t come across that, either.

I had forgotten, I have to confess, about Music for the Theatre — what a vital, exuberant work it was. Perhaps I never knew, in fact, since I grew up with the old Howard Hanson recording that had nothing of the raw energy and the sheer delight of the performance under Harth-Bedoya that concluded last week’s Green Umbrella concert (the first of the season‘s series, by the way, which have now been cut back from seven to six to a paltry five). Here is the 25-year-old Copland, just back from his years at the Boulangerie, full of bright new knowledge of what was making the musical world go around in 1925 — jazz, Kurt Weill, Schoenberg, Stravinsky — and bursting to put it all to use. In this one stunning work — huge ideas beautifully shaped for a 20-piece theater-size orchestra — he did just that. No composer ever announced his own arrival as vividly, as arrogantly, as Copland in this piece; the glorious reading at Zipper Auditorium (the Umbrella’s new home) proclaimed that all those initial strengths remain undiminished.

They remain undiminished, as well, in the work that began the program, the Sextet that Copland had fashioned from his 1933 Short Symphony after the formidable Stokowski and Koussevitzky had given up trying to cope with its rhythms — kid stuff to today‘s conductors, as the recent Michael Tilson Thomas recording easily proves. This is muscle-flexing music, its pristine arrogance still intact after 60-plus years. I must say, I prefer the Sextet version, through which cold, bracing breezes blow unimpeded by drums and brasses. David Howard’s eloquent clarinet the other night was probably what seduced me into feeling that way.

At the County Museum a couple of weeks before, that precious series known as the Monday Evening Concerts also began with Copland, with performers from the Copland House — the composer‘s home in the Hudson Valley, now maintained as a study center — in an elegant program of chamber music including the Piano Quartet, most successful of the “atonal” works, and the searing Vitebsk Trio, a tribute to its creator’s ancestry. Pianist Michael Boriskin and flutist Paul Lustig Dunkel, the center‘s co-directors, were among the players, obviously collaborating in a labor of love, in music that deserved no less.

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An Energetic, Electric, Eclectic Orange

COSTA MESA, Calif. — When last we visited California’s Orange County, that high-property-value enclave just to the south (and far to the right) of Los Angeles, the Orange County Philharmonic Society’s first “Eclectic Orange” Festival had run its course. Local audiences may have seemed surprised at their having survived (and even derived a certain prickly pleasure) from a month’s exposure to music very old and very new, experimental, and challenging, but the best news is that they came back for more.

The second run began with high decibels on Oct. 13 (Philip Glass’s new Fifth Symphony in its West Coast premiere [see previous review]) and ends on a similar volume level with worthier fare (Mahler’s Second), on Dec.1. In between there has been something for everyone, at least for everyone endowed with proper tolerance for horizon-stretching and high musical adventure.

By accident or design, “Eclectic Orange 2000” bore striking resemblances to its predecessor. Once again, there was one long and useless evening-filling symphony (the reconstructed Elgar Third last year, the Glass Fifth this year). The marvelous early-music ensemble Anonymous 4 joined forces with instruments in a new venture into spiritual affectation (last year’s “Voices of Light,” this year a new commissioned work by England’s Sir John Tavener). Downtown New York composer Mikel Rouse, whose astounding media opera “Dennis Cleveland” drew cheers last year, drew more of same this time with another new work, “Failing Kansas.”

Like “Cleveland,” “Failing Kansas” is an opera mostly because its composer says so. Its story line is the famous murder of a Kansas family in the 1950s, the capture and execution of its perpetrators, as retold in Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” One live performer, Rouse himself, speaks and sings material relevant to the story; other voices on tape create a panoramic collage of ordinary lives invaded by horror. On screen, Cliff Baldwin’s films invest the drama with a visual counterpart. Why it works is not easily explained, why the power, the tragedy — even the beauty — combine for a compelling 75-minute drama. But it does.

The term “more of same” also applies, alas, to the new Tavener piece for Anonymous 4 and the Chilingirian String Quartet, co-commissioned by the Philharmonic Society: 20-or-so minutes of Tavener’s familiar juicily harmonized syllabic chug-chug as a setting of the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins — which Bach turned to better use in his “Wachet auf!” cantata.

Far more stimulating, if poorly attended, was one other of the festival’s excursions into current creativity, a splendid duo-piano evening by Ursula Oppens and Aki Takahashi, demonstrating Richard Teitlebaum’s creation of super-pianos through electronic processing. Boston’s splendid young Borromeo String Quartet introduced Steve Mackey’s “Ars Moriendi” in its world premiere: nine movements, 23 minutes of soft (if, at times, rather spongy) death-meditation.

Not everything at Eclectic Orange turned out all that eclectic, or that fresh-out-of-the-box. Pianist Andras Schiff’s wonderful take on the “Goldberg Variations” served to establish Bach, as if anyone still doubted, as a composer for all centuries. And, as the ultimate demonstration of music’s power to move the immovable and draw the tears of the hardest of heart, there came the Southern California recital debut of the miraculously gifted young tenor Ian Bostridge, in a Schubert-Wolf song program given, as proper, in the kind of improvised small space where this music belongs.

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Eclectic Orange

When last we visited California’s Orange County, that high-property-value enclave just to the south – and far to the right – of Los Angeles, the OC Philharmonic Society’s first “Eclectic Orange” Festival had run its course. Local audiences may have seemed surprised at their having survived (and even derived a certain prickly pleasure) from a month’s exposure to music very old and very new, experimental and challenging, but the best news is that they came back for more. The second run began with high decibels on October 13 (Philip Glass’ new Fifth Symphony in its West Coast premiere) and ends on a similar volume level with worthier fare (Mahler’s Second), on December 1; in between there was something for everyone, at least for everyone endowed with proper tolerance for horizon-stretching and high musical adventure.
By accident or design, “Eclectic Orange 2000” bore striking resemblances to its predecessor. Once again, there was one long and useless evening-filling symphony (the reconstructed Elgar Third last year, the Glass Fifth this year). The marvelous early-music ensemble Anonymous 4 joined forces with instruments in a new venture into spiritual affectation (last year’s “Voices of Light,” this year a new commissioned work by England’s Sir John Tavener).  Downtown New York composer Mikel Rouse, whose astounding media opera “Dennis Cleveland” drew cheers last year, drew more of same with another work, “Failing Kansas.”
Like “Cleveland,” “Failing Kansas” is an opera mostly because its composer says so. Its story line is the famous murder of a Kansas family in the 1950s, the capture and execution of its perpetrators, as retold in Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” One live performer, Rouse himself, speaks and sings material relevant to the story; other voices on tape create a panoramic collage of ordinary lives invaded by horror; on screen, Cliff Baldwin’s films invest the drama with a visual counterpart. Why it works is not easily explained, why the power, the tragedy – and even the beauty – combine for a compelling 75-minute drama. But it does.
“More of same” also applies, alas, to the new Tavener piece for Anonymous 4 and the Chilingirian String Quartet, co-commissioned by the Philharmonic Society: 20-or-so minutes of Tavener’s familiar juicily harmonized syllabic chug-chug as a setting of the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins – which Bach turned to better use in his “Wachet auf!” cantata. Far more stimulating, if poorly attended, was one other of the festival’s excursions into current creativity, a splendid duo-piano evening by Ursula Oppens and Aki Takahashi, demonstrating Richard Teitlebaum’s creation of super-pianos through electronic processing. Boston’s splendid young Borromeo String Quartet introduced Steve Mackey’s “Ars Moriendi” in its world premiere, nine movements, 23 minutes of soft (if, at times, rather spongy) death-meditation.
Not everything at Eclectic Orange turned out all that eclectic, or that fresh-out-of-the-box. Pianist Andras Schiff’s wonderful take on the “Goldberg Variations” served to establish Bach, as if anyone still doubted, as a composer for all centuries. And, as the ultimate demonstration of music’s power to move the immovable and draw the tears of the hardest of heart, there came the Southern California recital debut of the miraculously gifted young tenor Ian Bostridge, in a Schubert-Wolf song program given, as proper, in the kind of improvised small space where this music belongs.

Posted in Musical America | Comments Off on Eclectic Orange