So I've Heard

AFTER 2010, WHAT? “It’s been a momentous week,” noted Mark Swed in yesterday’s “Critic’s Notebook,” and he was, even so, a day early. The worst news of last week, many weeks, was Gérard Mortier’s decision to resign as head of the New York City Opera, over the unwillingness of board members to finance his dreams, before a note was sung under  his administration. A forward move in operatic administration that could be likened to – what? – to the striding forth of the New York City Opera at its inception, — had claimed a major leader.
Here at home we are in a momentous dither over the ten weeks of RingFest that will seize our city’s interest in 2010, direct our collective gaze toward a certain mode of artistic expression, adapt our taste buds toward a certain culinary ideal (mostly covered with brown sauce, if memory serves),  fill our ears with massive orchestrations of unresolved dominant thirteenths. I’ve seen it happen. I was in Seattle in 1975,  during early Ringomania. Glynn Ross and his opera company were vesting upon the city not one but two Rings, one sung in English the other not, and United Airlines was sharing in a citywide promotion so vast that everyone you saw on the streets carried a UAL bag decorated with Valhalla images. The performances weren’t much; the sets were make-do, but that was a Ring, by God, and it ran for several years. I went up and wrote that it wasn’t very good, and several shocked local critics c ame to interview me; nobody had ever noticed before. It got Seattle so bored with the whole Ring  idea that when Speight Jenkins took over the company and started producing real opera, including a handsome, naturalistic Ring  set among Northwest-style evergreens, and beautifully performed, the public treats it as an opera, not some kind of shrine.
Anyhow – I’ve wandered – will it somehow occur to somebody here at home that Gérard Mortier would be the right man to lead the Los Aneles Opera, away from four-Puccinis-a-season and toward a contemporary distinctiveness equal to that of the Philharmonic and other arts organizations. The acquisition of Achim Freyer to creat the local Ring  is a great step forward; he is the legacy of the late Edgar Baitzel, who up of the moment of his death served the company nobly as what the Germans call Dramaturg and can take credit for most of the forward movement the company has shown in rrecent years, but Edgard is gone. He brought Achim Freyer here for The Damnation of Faust and (to lesser credit) the staged B-minor Mass. Without a dramaturg of that quality, we get The Fly and reruns of an ancient Carmen production and Marta Domingo’s hapless Traviata.
I am not so foolish as to hope that Mortier would step down the ladder from an executive post to something less with the L.A. Opera. I am suggesting that the L.A. Opera needs his executive service, under whatever title. It also needs a full time artistic administrator, not one who is also the administrator, or the singing star even entrusted with creating new productions with other companies, and is away from this, his own company,  leaving operas for his iwife to direct, usually ineptly, for long periods for  reasons that are various common knowledge. If this requires creating an executive post with a new name, for one position or both, I am naïve enough to think that might not be so diffictult.  Mortier, I might naively add, has supportive friends out here. The last time I looked, he, the great patron Betty Freeman and I were going for a walk..

BEEFCAKE: November’s Disney Hall program book has a new Esa-Pekka picture on the cover, beefcake-of-the month, a reminder that we are wrong to let him get away. Miguel Harth-Bedoya is this week’s conductor; he once was our associate conductor, and we shouldn’t have let him get away, either. A lively, exuberant spirit, friendly to audience, audiences and music, he was all over the place last night.
Who couldn’t love “Appalachian Spring,” music with not one note to prick or irritate? I suppose I could, for just that reason; I long for one of those unresolved thirteenths I was discussing up there. I haven’t looked at the score, but I’ll bet it’s all in  F and G major, and sometimes just reaches out hungrily for a sharp of a flat. Copland’s original score, for only thirteen instruments, goes along better with this mood than the blown-up orchestral version, and I’ll bet it would have sound a whole lot better before the Britten last night. But it is a very pretty score, a smile of an autumn night without an angry thought to stir into its apple-pie mind
Britten’s Violin Concerto…now where did that come from? (I rushed home, and in my bundles of Britten there wasn’t a single copy. I fixed that from Amazon for a mere seven bucks.) It is a very strange piece, by turns emotional and aloof, beautiful turns for the soloist, mere hiccoughs from the orchestra. The first movement is tight, self-contained. The scherzo devolves into a recit, then something else, than it just keeps going; you want to break in and remind them you’re here. Midori played it as if she truly believed it, and I think she does; after her showbiz years she’s become a fascinating musician, wonderful to watch.

PACKAGES: Naxos of America has become the most active, and thus the most interesting, source of home media, both compact disc and DVD, as an outlet for a number of associated European labels. That number seems to be growing; it includes a veritable inundation of opera performances from European stages, where videocasting is apparently much more common than here if not necessarily more proficient. There is also a profusion of musical documentary material, some of which I’ve already written about. It’s difficult to keep up with the flood.
Here is a five-DVD package from Naxos, produced by Medici Arts, of composer-documentaries, priced at a dirt-cheap $49.99. Some of its content – Frank Sheffer’s “Labyrinth of Time,” an Elliott Carter piece that tells us little – has been around for a while. The rest is new to me, and wonderful. Pierre Boulez reconstructs his great work “Sur Incises,” a piece for three interlocked chamber ensembles, in front of a student group and then leads a performance. Olivier Messiaen spends time in the great Utah gorges that inspired his last great work, and discusses with captivating intensity his passion for the smaller creatures of God’s earth. In a series of short musical sketches the quiet joyousness of Arvo Pärt gradually takes shape. Philip Glass natters on and on, just like his music; toward the end of many long minutes, he and Bob Wilson afford us some of the wisdom in their wisest work, “Einstein on the Beach.”
It does not necessarily follow that the voice of composer, author or painter becomes the most expressive medium to convey the essence of an artistic conscience. For all the information we may glean from  awareness that Philip Glass delivers words rapid-fire, as does Steve Reich by the way  — as does much of their music — little more is added from awareness that Elliott makes (or used to make) the beds himself in the Carters’ apartment.

TICK TALK: You know, or should know, of Judith Tick as  biographer of the important
composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, creator of a small heritage of important chamber music that good ensembles – the Arditti, Kronos — know to keep alive. Now she and her assistant editor Paul Beaudoin have created a truly awesome and significant volume with the modest title “Music in the United States” and the immodest ambition of serving as a “documentary companion” to the history of musical activity in this country drawn from actual evidence, from before it existed as a country until pretty much the day before yesterday. The fruit of their labors is large and lavish: 881+xxxviii pages weighing, in paperback, a smidge over five pounds. It’s published by Oxford, a step back from their last Music History fiasco.
What treasures! Our national musical history, in the writings of its perpetrators!. Here is Samuel Sewall’s Diary, he a judge of the Salem witches: “About midnight my dear wife expired, to our great astonishment, especially mine. May the Sovereign Lord pardon my sin…”
At the famous Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889. where Debussy first heard the music of Gamelan, there was also a concert of American music, and here is a certain Brument-Colleville (who didn’t make it to Slonimsky’s “Dictionary of Musical Invective”) on the subject of Edward MacDowell’s Second Piano Concerto, dealing with the anomaly of an American composing classical music: “It is made to disgust you forever with the instrument so dear…One asks oneself is it really a piano playing, and not a mill for grinding out notes. God, it’s annoying!!”
Seventy years ago this week Arturo Toscanini braves the horrors of modern music, offering a broadcast world premiere of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” drawing down a favorable huff from the NYT’s Olin Downes and a storm of correspondence that kept the Times’ columns busy for weeks thereafter.
Here is Morty Feldman, in a book of his correspondence: “Usually my pieces begin maybe on the tenth measure, kind of getting into it…”
Again at the Times, Harold Schonberg, the Chief Critic who once hired me, takes an entire Sunday column to air his profound misunderstanding, couched in basic belligerence, of contemporary cultural trends. “Art is bunk…” this from a  Times critic!
Of what use, you might ask, so ponderous a tome to a fireside reader? I used to think that, about Otto Erich Deutsch’s “documentary” companions to Mozart and Schubert. Then I let myself get hooked, on the newspaper reviews, travel clippings, small bits of info that let me get involved in the musical life of small and large  cities in the lives of these composers and their friends, and whole panoramas opened up. Read the chapters in this book on the olden times; play the two great Angel discs by Anonymous 4 of old-timey American music, and sail away.

SUBLIME INDULGENCE: Sunday provided two concerts: the Schubert C-major Quintet in the afternoon; all six Brandenburg Concerti at night; what unknown Deity have I accidentally appeased lately?  I have known about the Lark Conservatory and the musical activities it sponsors, especially the Dilijan Concert Series. I keep having to tell Movses Pogossian, the series’ artistic director and a terrific local violinist, that his this-and-that concert falls on the wrong date for me. This time the presence of the Schubert Quintet automatically made it the right date. Movses played second violin, with Guiillaume Sutre; Paul Coletti was the violist; Ronald Leonard and Antonio Lysy were the cellists. THEY EVEN  TOOK THE FIRST- MOVEMENT REPEAT, bless them. Their playing of the slow movement had me clinging to my seat. I can’t remember a more beautiful chamber-music performance in this town in a very long time. Nobody from the Times was there. Earlier there was a new work, the Second Quartet by Ruben Albunyan (b. 1939), proficient, predictable in the “Schelomo” vein, ending exactly where it should. The next Dilijan concert, at Zipper, will be on December 21.
A few years ago, when the L.A. Chamber Orchestra played all the Brandenburgs I wrote that hearing them all in one whoop was like having my own box of Godiva chocolates, and the Godiva company sent me a box. Since then I’ve been diagnosed with diabetes, so let me say it’s more like having my own Mercedes. At the risk, however, of sounding a note of ingratitude in advance of delivery, conscience ordains a piece I must speak, a qualm that besets me along with the euphoria that usually accompanies my departure from LACO concerts. It has to do with mismatch: the robust sound of the modern flute against the harpsichord in the Fourth Brandenburg, conflicting with my memory of the exquisite balance in the same work in the recent Musica Angelica concert. I think we are at a new crisis where the halfway measures sort-of worked  because of the excellent musicianship with bands like LACO. After all these years, however, I found myself last night cringing at the sound of LACO’s flutes in Bach. This has nothing to do with David Shostac and Susan Greenberg, whose playing I intensely admire. With the emergence of LACO under Jeff Kahaneas a superlative Mozart and Haydn orchestra, its activities as a Bach orchestra may need some reconsideration. I note with interest that some record company, maybe having exhausted all sensible reissue source materials, is planning a release of the ancient Brandenburg set by the Adolf Busch Chamber Players from the early ‘30s, the first recording in circulation with any pretense toward “authentic” performance. The most “authentic” element in that bulk two-album 78-rpm set was the presence of a high trumpeter in Brandenburg 2; his name was George Eskdale, and he played elegantly and stylishly (not show-offishly as David Washburn did last night and then multiplied the sin in an even-faster encore repeat). Otherwise, Rudolf Serkin played continuo on the piano; the flutes were just flutes, and, in those days – which were also my days – we all thought they sounded simply terrific, authentic, the real thing. Tempora mutantur, et nos in illis, as we used to intone in the corridors of Boston Latin School.

THE PAST IMPERFECT
Who doesn’t remember Leon Levich? If there are three of you in a room, Leon tuned two of your pianos, and hocked you a chainick all afternoon about his own music and why it never gets played. Anyhow, he was at the latest “Chamber Music in Historic Sites” last Sunday, at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, and his music did get played. At 81, he has gone a little cuckoo; he forgets the names of his old pals but remembers vividly his days in prison camp, in Italy during WWII. His music – a slow movement from a String Quartet and a “Phantasy” for flute and string trio, nicely played by Eugenia Zukerman and the Jacques Thibaud Trio – amounted to pleasant nothingness. But there was that  dear old man himself,  bathed in his own beatific smile, with an audience of his contemporaries paying him homage, and I guess that was enough.
The rest of the program was sterner stuff, with one work – Gideon Klein’s String Trio – actually composed in death camp mere weeks before the composer’s murder in the gas ovens. Sixty-four years later we are still confronted with this small repertory of music, including stage works, which demands consideration on humanistic grounds. Everything that I have heard – music by Gideon Klein, Viktor Ullman, Hans Krasa (whose Brundibár was largely completed before camp) and their unfortunate colleagues – is the work of well-trained middle-European practitioners, not yet endowed with an original voice. Kurt Weill, a single instance, rose above them, perhaps Paul Hindemith, the non-Jewish (if that matters). They had the carfare to escape.
LAST WORD: Don’t ask why it should be, but the most beautiful playing, the most deeply felt and most imaginatively set forth on both of Andrås Schiff’s two Beethoven programs here at Disney Hall were the encore pieces, neither of them byBeethoven. First came Bach’s “Italian Concerto,” whose slow-movement melody hung suspended like a perfectly formed cloud, rendering pointless any discussion about the wisdom of Bach on the piano (as Anderszewski’s Bach recital had done once again two days later). Then, a week later, Schiff capped a so-so recital, which included a rather brutalized renditin of the “Appassionata,” with the slow final movement of Schumann’s C-major Fantasia, and led me to believe that that movement might well be the high point in musical Romanticism. (Don’t laugh until you go and play it –  by Schiff if there’s a recording or by Brendel or Rubinstein — , and don’t dare breathe through that sublime modulation – you’ll  know which one when you come to it).
ANGELIC
Musica Angelica is now our flagship Baroque orchestra, much strengthened from ensembles claiming that position in the past and firmly in place under Martin Haselböck’s direction. This past weekend’s concert was its first of the season, with a predictable plateful by a couple of Bachs, the inevitable but welcome Vivaldi and Telemann and the impostor Johann Gottlieb Graun. I name him “impostor”; only a few years later than his Baroque program-mates, his music has already begun to slide into patterns that begin to sound clunky against the grace of his programmatic pals. On this weekend’s high-stepping program, he was the one with the club foot
Otherwise there was an interesting if irregular piece by a Bach cousin, Johann Bernard, with tiny movements that began and never really ended. Marion Verbruggen played a sopranino recorder in a Vivaldi concerto, and it sounded as if TinkerBell had come to visit. Later he joined with a more solemn instrument, against Vittorio Ghielmi’s viola da gamba, in a Telemann Double, Concerto. Mr. Ghielmi and Ilie Korol (the orchestra’s concertmaster) joined in the Graun Concerto. At the end another recorder player,  Rohem Gilbert, joined in from the orchestra and everybodu had the grandest of grand old times in Bach’s Fourth Brandenburg Concerto, music that always makes everybody want to join in, You couldn’t ask for a more fun concert than that.

TOO HOT TO HANDLE?
My editors at Bloomberg News had suggested weeks ago that the following item would be worth my attention. I never asked why. I fulfilled my obligation last Tuesday with my usual celerity and dispatch. On Wednesday I was informed that my article – honorable though it was – was “totally off the charts” for Bloomberg’s clients. I could have told them that weeks ago.
Antony and Johnsons Drag Disney Hall Into Pop World
Review by Alan Rich
Oct. 16: First of all, there’s the voice, and
it’s a wondrous instrument. It swoops to cavernous depths;
you’re reminded of Erda, the Earth-Goddess in Wagner’s “Ring.”
It mounts to an ecstatic peak, exulting over “a beautiful boy”
in a duet with the shrill woodwinds of the orchestra. This is
the voice of Antony (last name Hegarty, Sussex-born) who
stood before a jam-
packed Disney Hall audience on Tuesday night in Los Angeles,
gowned in floor-length white silk and feathers, and held that
crowd — gay, straight and teetering — spellbound. That is what
he and his group have been doing since “I Am A Bird” pulled
down their first album prize in 2005.
Explain Antony? Nobody is on solid ground. He is 37, chunky
in a friendly sort of way. As a stage singer, his gesticulations
are, well, grandmotherly. The voice carries it all, and that is,
as we were saying, something phenomenal: an artist’s palette of
amazing variety. Too much of a good thing? Yes, truth to tell;
midway through Tuesday’s concert, a certain sameness did settle
in. One longed for the sound of a coloratura soprano, or a basso
profundo.
He has kept interesting company: one lachrymose duet (“You
Are My Sister”) with Britain’s one-time renegade songster Boy
George, a duet with Icelandic pop-genius Bjork. The “Johnsons”
were a small instrumental ensemble (three strings, guitar and
piano); for the current tour they have grown to a 19-piece
orchestra. Elaborate orchestrations, sometimes to excess – string vibrato
conflicting with vocal vibrato –  were
by the up-and-coming 27-year-old New York composer Nico Muhly,
whose name seems to pop up in every glowing report on the future
of new music.
“Shake that Devil,’ Antony’s latest EP, has just been
released on Secretly Canadian records; the next album, “The
Crying Light,” is due in January. The current tour plays New
York’s Apollo Theater tonight and then returns to England, with
dates at London’s Barbican on October 30 and 31.
(Alan Rich is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions
expressed are his own.)
PIANISSIMO
András Schifff is now halfway through his survey of the Beethoven
piano sonatas – at Disney Hall and several other international venues. The
absolute technical sheen of his playing is both thrilling and off-putting. My most vivid pianist memories embrace concerts by  Rachmaninoff, Schnabel, Serkin, Gould, Brendel, and they include smudged notes and blurred phrases by all. (I can show you the note Rachmaninoff missed in the “Appassionata” in Symphony Hall Boston in December, 1940; these things stay with you.)
Listening to Schiff demands a different set of receptors; you wait for the machine to falter, and you know it’s not gonna happen. I am awestruck by the clarity of his playing, the absolute command. I can return  home from his concert with, say, the D-minor fury of Opus 31 No. 2 still rattling my bones, and take down my favorite authors on Beethoven – Tovey, Kerman – and find that, yes, it’s all true.  The Schiff performances itself had presented me with no point of view only the notes flawlessly revealed. The discs – he’s recording the Sonatas on ECM – are like so much software. His observations on the music – published conversations with man-of-all-cultures Martin  Mayer, a perfect foil – are sleek and unchallengeable; theyproceed on from the performances in this airless continuum.
At least you can’t fault Mr. Schiff for generosity; his encore last Wednesday was Bach’s “Italian” Concerto: not just one movement but the entire work; perhaps next Wednesday we’ll get the “Goldberg” Variations. On Saturday night Piotr Anderszewski followed suit;. Beethoven Bagatelles were his lagniappe following his Bach recital: not one, of the Opus 33 set, but the entire kaboodle. This was his first time here in three years: too long away.
It was a fabulous concert. Anderszewski has, indeed, found the way to create airspace around a contemporary piano delivering Bach, both reinventing and preserving the expressive genius within the music and reshaping it for our time. I think I know my Bach, and yet I found myself, at this concert, constantly led toward rediscoveries large and small: the chromatic, sweeping, descending lines in the A-minor Prelude from the “Well-Tempered Clavier” (and the terse, ensuing fugue, on the same subject that also served Handel and Mozart), the assemblage of massive structures that begins the G-minor “English” Suite, the infinite tragedy that this pianist drew by momentarily delaying a single note, the F-sharp leading tone to the Sarabande in that Suite. This concert, like the Schiff, drew a near-capacity crowd to Disney Hall – a large percentage of it, I was happy to note, young.
JACARANDISSIMO
I must try to restrain my use of words like “exhilarating” in dealing with the Jacaranda Concerts but it’s not easy. The series’ fifrh season began last Friday, relocated to the new Broad Stage this once, where the mighty forces of the CalArts Gamelan could fill the stage with Lou Harrison’s music in the first half – in clear and resonant sound, by the way — and the wondrous machinery of Harry Partch’s inventing could rise up from the orchestra pit to accomplish the same, in hearts and spades, or however the expression goes, in the second.
Lou Harrison told me, at our first meeting in, I think, 1981, that being a composer in California meant that you didn’t have to be afraid of writing pretty. The hour’s worth of his music for solos with gamelan were greatly pretty in the sense of gorgeous, seductive melodic lines propelled by tremendously complex rhythmic impulses. The series climaxed in a breath-stopping sequence: Alyssa Park’s violin, Tim Loo’s cello and Ted Askatz’s small drum  in glorious – yes, exhilarating – argument in Lou’s Double Concerto, against the massed hardware of the Gamelan.
Came intermission, and then the extreme contrast of the John Cage “Quartet in Four Parts” played by Jacaranda’s Denali Quartet, music of intense restraint (the strings playing without vibrato) following  the previous music of intense exuberance.  It was a beautiful performance, I guess; I couldn’t help thinking it was somewhat lost on this occasion. (At the post-concert party the Denali played a quartet by another American pioneer, Ben Johnston, to much greater effect.)
Up from the bowels of Broad came the Harry Partch assemblage: glorious glassware, the towering Bass Marimba, Diamond Marimba, Harmonic Canon, Kithara – all rebuilt from Harry’s original designs by the local hero John Schneider and played upon by latter-day Partch avatars under Schneider’s direction. Talk about exhilaration…what they played was “Castor and Pollux” from the “Plectra and Percussion Dances,” music performed in 1953 and not again until last year. Wow and triple wow!!
Nobody is going to argue for a place for Harry Partch’s music among any kind of masterpiece galaxy. The half-hour of “Castor and Pollux” that sent the Jacaranda crowd home happy consisted of a lot of rhythmic banging, in square, predictable patterns,  on these gorgeously designed sound machines, great fun to watch and to listen to. The music is, of course, tied to these machines. Of melodic shape or design there is none. There doesn’t have to be. Music has its mainstreams of great creators who fashion a repertory of masterpieces and near-masterpieces to fill our concert halls, opera houses and rock palaces. It speaks for music’s power that it can also spawn these other creative spirits, these fashioners of alternative theories (with compositions to back them up). Harry was one of the best.

A FURTHER NOTE ON THE UPCOMING WORLD’S END:
URBANA, Ohio (AP) — A defendant had a hard time facing the music
Andrew Vactor was facing a $150 fine for playing rap music too loudly on his car stereo in July. But a judge offered to reduce that to $35 if Vactor spent 20 hours listening to classical music by the likes of Bach, Beethoven and Chopin.
Vactor, 24, lasted only about 15 minutes, a probation officer said.
It wasn’t the music, Vactor said, he just needed to be at practice with the rest of the Urbana University basketball team.
”I didn’t have the time to deal with that,” he said. ”I just decided to pay the fine.”
Champaign County Municipal Court Judge Susan Fornof-Lippencott says the idea was to force Vactor to listen to something he might not prefer, just as other people had no choice but to listen to his loud rap music.
”I think a lot of people don’t like to be forced to listen to music,” she said.

WEST SIDE STORY
The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage and the Edye Second Space sit in a veritable ocean of parking space, and that is one of many blessings. Saturday night saw the official opening – the Broad Stage for a concert, the Second Space to welcome the freeloaders for a splendid Chinese feed afterwards. The concert was a vocal event: Frederica von Stade and Kristin Clayton with Jake Heggie at the piano in a program that included the local premiere of Heggie’s solo cantata “At the Statue of Venus” and an assortment of songs, arias and duets. Dustin Hoffman, who is on the Broad Stage Advisory Board, served as official greeter. “Broad,” by the way, rhymes with “road.”
The Broad Stage – the hall itself, that is – seats 499 with a single balcony and a few side boxes. There is no center aisle, but the space between rows isn’t as cramped as at Disney. The hall is handsome; the seats are comfortable; the johns are accessible. Everyone was comparing notes with everyone else about acoustics, but there’s nothing to be said as yet on the evidence of a concert with just singers and piano. Kristin Clayton tended to swallow her words in the Heggie piece, but that was no more the fault of acoustics than of poor vocal technique and a clumsy, verbose text often drowned by the piano. I’ll get back to that in a moment.
Much has been made of the fact that the Broad affords a proper concert venue to save us West Side audiences the ardors of the downtown commute on I-10. and that is indeed a boon. (There is also UCLA’s Royce Hall, three times as large and with a charge for parking.) The Broad is the right size and shape to develop as a center for small-audience events: new music, very old music. Next week Jacaranda plays there (on Friday, please note, not the usual Saturday); Musica Angelica, our excellent local early-music band,  plays there the following week. I would guess that both these groups have predominantly West-Side followings; they should feel at home in the new room.
By the same token, Saturday’s concert fell somewhat short of the level I would hope to encounter  in these premises. “Flicka” von Stade is a beloved, veteran opera personality whom I have adored in some instances – Cherubino at the Met, Cherubin in Santa Fe – and deplored in others – Gerolstein at the L.A. Opera. She gives generously of herself, as in a similar program recently for the Long Beach Opera. She has made Jake Heggie something of a house composer far beyond his merits, and has carried his “Dead Man Walking” far on her slender shoulders. But it is sad that she allows a paying audience to witness her vocal decline, and sadder still when she employs her personal prestige to bring this singularly untalented note-spinner to the attention of audiences he does not deserve.  “At the Statue of Venus” is a text by  Terrence McNally, a blind-date number dispatching in far too many words what Barbara Cook did so beautifully in her “Will He Like Me?”number from “She Loves Me.” Ms. Clayton’s credentials are impressive, although rooted in the past; the matter at hand is that the music is dull, was dully sung, and that it was no way to begin life in the new hall.

NICHOLAS WAS RIGHT
It’s common practice to deplore Nicholas Rubinstein for his savage attack on the hapless Tchaikovsky, when the 34-year-old composer played him his First Piano Concerto – in hopes that the older pianist would take the work into the repertory. Sometimes it occurs to me, however, that old Nicholas may have had a point or two – and I say this without for a moment denying that I usually have a wonderful time every time I hear the work, and I had a particularly fine time when Yefim Bronfman played it with Salonen and the Philharmonic at Disney Hall last week. This Concerto, in fact, may well stand as the world’s greatest piece of bad music. REALLY bad, I mean: utterly irrational in organization, painfully distended in melodic shape, illogical on different grounds in each of its three movements.
More to the point, the Concerto tends to improve under mistreatment. This time, for example, I heard no coordination between the clean, rational orchestral playing under Salonen and Bronfman’s brutal  hammering. Not since the classic Horowitz/Toscanini recording have I heard those climactic octaves in the last movement so clobbered out of recognition. Whatever musical beauty abides in this fascinating grotesque of a virtuoso showcase – and I am not prepared to argue, or to care about, the possible presence of such beauty – I heard no such element in Thursday’s performance – the first of four last week. Did it matter? Not for a moment!
Yes, I love this Concerto, for what it is. There are small, thrilling episodes: the final few chords of the slow movement, for example, and those octaves in the finale. Salonen, I am told, had not conducted the music before in his 17 years here in Los Angeles, or anywhere else. Why should he? He and Bronfman were a team made in Heaven – for Salonen’s own Concerto at the end of last season, and now for this.
Stravinsky’s “Firebird” – all of it – ended the program I can live without the first half-hour (of the total 45 minutes), but this time the very opening — the subliminal, dark groan almost out of hearing range – was something memorable in itself: virtuoso orchestra, virtuoso hall.

THE GRIM WEEPER
Joseph Kerman, whose “Opera as Drama” contains the immortal phrase “’Tosca,’ that shabby little shocker,” comes down somewhat more gentl y on  “Madama Butterfly.”  Taking careful note of the opera’s “coarseness of sensitivity,”he concedes brownie points to the one truly poignant scene, in Act Two, as the Consul Sharpless  vainly attempts to read  Pinkerton’s letter to Butterfly and thus convince her  that her romantic fantasies  must end. It is, indeed, a beautifully written scene; with Robert Wilson’s staging, all light and shadow and soft whisperings from James Conlon’s orchestra. The action  is confined to minimal gestures and  it works very beautifully at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
This is the third time around for “Butterfly,” in only five seasons; our company’s service to Puccini – at the expense of Verdi, among others – becomes an obsession.  I love Wilson’s staging,  especially when he is actually present at rehearsals  to supervise the infinite subtleties of his lighting plan – as he is this time around, and was not the last time. His staging is all about light: the subtle shifting in background color, the delicate play of light on a character’s outstretched hand. (I’ve watched him rehearse just this kind of effect, sometimes for hours, to get it right.)  One beautiful moment: as Butterfly and her “replacement” Kate meet in the final act, the American woman extends a  hearty handshake,   Butterfly a confused trembling; just that contrast sums up the essence of the tragedy.
The stage is practically empty:  no “fiorito asil” of a honeymoon cottage, no  charming tea  ceremony,  the most basic costumes, Kabuki-inspired.  Wilson’s Butterfly this time is Liping Zhang, who has worked with him before. In sight and sound she is perfect in the role, a voice both sweet and strong, a compelling, handsome presence.. As right as she is in her role, so is her Pinkerton totally wrong: burly, screeching Franco Farina.
Wilson’s one major addition to the opera’s plan of action is the presence of the small boy – named “Trouble” in the libretto,  but left unnamed  here – who frolicks  unknowing  on the stage as his mother’s world collapses.  No such action is called for in the libretto; the child might as well be a load of bread.  But Wilson’s emendation immeasurably strengthens the focus of the drama; the boy who must now endure  the collision,  of East against West in his new American home.  Eleven-year-old  Sean Eaton was the child  on opening night and,  of course, stole the show and the hearts of us all.

Measure by measure, note by note, the new season begins. Saturday night  the old season ended at the Bowl, which drew some fifteen thousand of us, chilled and exasperated after some of the season’s worst traffic, to an evening of  poetry and music inspired y Rumi- – “the Sights and Sounds of Mystic Persia.” (Robert Wilson  was involved in my last encounter with Rumi’s poetry, a multi-media affair at Royce Hall with Philip Glass’s music, “Monsters of Grace,” best forgotten. ) The dancing was marvelous: two different Dervish groups  in their whirling, twirling dance movement  s. There was a remarkable vocalist, Hamid Reza Nourbakhsh. At the end came Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble, playing a long new piece whose name I didn’t catch, whose  basic harmony seemed to undulate  between two chords (One-to-flat- Two, for you harmony students, or think “Malaguena”) for a very long time. At the side of the stage a calligrapher , OstadYadollah  Kaboli, worked steadily to create an intricate and handsome manuscript, and I have to admit that I found his work the evening’s most transfixing segment. Many years ago, when American graffiti was seeking acceptance as an art form, I saw a dance company – Twyla Tharpe’s,  if memory serves – in a ballet with Beach Boys’ music and some graffiti artists working on a huge scroll behind the dancers  that kept  rising as the artists filled the space. That was my first experience with dancers-plus-calligraphy, and I remember it still.

PianoSpheres clocked in three nights later and, despite the Jewish holiday conflict,  came close to filling Zipper Hall. Most of Gloria Cheng’s program duplicated her recent (and splendid) TelArc disc: Esa-Pekka  Salonen’s “Dichotomie” best of all. This is a dazzling piece; I love the whimsy in Salonen’s own descripton,  that he planned a short encore piece for Gloria, which then got out of hand. It starts off huge and ferocious  (and stunningly scored, as if its creator was some kind of all-knowing piano virtuoso, which we know  he isn’t.) Fifteen-or-so minutes later it has subsided, charmingly. Can you think of a finer  brand-new  large-scale piano work since, perhaps, Carter’s “Night Fantasies”? I can’t.
Witold Lutoslawski’s early Piano Sonata, also on the disc, filled out the first half of the program: interesting in its reflection of the very young composer’s obvious  fixation on Ravel and other French late romantics,  but not much of a piece otherwise.

At Royce Hall just last night the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra began its (!) 40th season to a large crowd, many of whom stood when Jeff Kahane polled the audience for 40-year subscribers.  Well and good, but LACO’s spirit is youthful and adventurous, and  that spirit also deserves to be matched with some new blood out front. (From the traffic jam of walkers, pushing up the aisle at intermission, you’d almost think you were back on             I-405. ) It was an interesting program: Frank Martin’s big, dryly humorous Concerto for Solo Winds and Orchestra,  Dick Todd in one of the Mozart Horn Concertos and, at the end, Kahane’s surging, vital reading of the Mozart 39th, most elegantly scored of all the Symphonies –- those clarinets!!

Some week!
The financial leaders in Washington formulate their notion of the end of the world, while the cultural leaders in gray, dismal Cleveland accomplish much the same for theirs. Surely you’ve seen the news. Don Rosenberg, music critic for lo these many years at Cleveland’s leading paper The Plain Dealer, is asked to turn in his badge and leave off writing about the one internationally-honored cultural asset that city possesses, its symphony orchestra. The circumstances, though dire, are hardly unique. Every city’s cultural resources, at least in this country, are governed by boards of that city’s most prominent moneybags, who also own businesses that take out the largest ads in that city’s newspapers. An editor’s door, therefore, is always open to visits by members of those boards when some aspect of the cultural events the bankroll do not follow their own definition of the pleasure principle.  It does not necessarily follow that those board members know shit from shinola about whatever artform they serve – an opera company, a symphony orchestra, a museum. At the end of the day, they expect to be pleasured by that artform, not forced to think very hard about its content, and have their egos massaged by the critics of their local press, to whom they look for confirmation.

Don Rosenberg of the Plain Dealer denied them that confirmation, more often than they would have liked. I don’t know him very well, but I’ve read him fairly often on the matter of  the Cleveland Orchestra and its current conductor, Franz Welser-Moest (henceforth: FWM), who currently owns the podium once trod by George Szell, and more recently by Christoph von Dohnanyi, to the orchestra’s greater glory. I love the sight and sound of the orchestra’s Severance Hall; I’ve heard FWM in action there and also here, as guest with our own Philharmonic. Most of the time I’ve been unimpressed, never shocked but never truly moved. His one saving grace is the Cleveland Orchestra’s own pride of place, a tradition that goes back to the George Szell days. There’s a kind of chamber-music thinking that Cleveland players inherit and pass on; I’ve talked to many of them about this. Perhaps it’s their awareness that they’re all the city has.

Anyhow, Don Rosenberg – past president of the Music Critics Association, currently still on its board – may be over-reacting just a tad in his steadfast unwillingness to forgive FWM for not being Szell or Dohnanyi, but he has a point. What’s more he has the education, prestige and experience to deserve the job he has held until now.  The legendary Claudia Cassidy at the Chicago Tribune couldn’t forgive a whole roster of conductors for not being Frederick Stock. Our own Martin Bernheimer could never forgive Los Angeles for not being Vienna. The worst that can happen to a critic under these circumstances is to become predictable, but that doesn’t constitute grounds for firing, or – in Rosenberg’s case – demotion. I must say, the Plain Dealer’s action in this case – keeping Don on staff but blindfolding him to the existence of the Cleveland Orchestra, the one reason for a music critic to function – is shameless to a fault. On the same day that the NYTimes carried the demotion story the Plain Dealer published a blatant, ass-kissing tribute to FWM and the orchestra, by the intern who’s now been handed Rosenberg’s job, a 31-year-old writer of feature stories, Zack Lewis. I don’t envy him, risking being booed by the Severance Hall audience as he takes his aisle seat.

Naturally, there has been an outcry by a lot of what remains of the musical press, here and abroad. Steve Smith’s story in the Baltimore Sun covers it all, and is followed by a long string of reader comments, pro and con, that I find really instructive as to who it is the remaining few of us are really talking to.
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/classicalmusic/2008/09/critic_who_dared criticize_cle.html

BRAVE SOULS: A good-sized crowd showed up at Zipper last Friday and were well rewarded; this was the preview concert of the Carlsbad Festival, which actually ends up in Carlsbad this weekend (Friday and Saturday nights, Sunday afternoon). I like the Festival; the music is interesting and the planning is actually about something: young composers, or once-young composers, raising a bit of hell with standard definitions. It’s also a study in chutzpah: Matt McBane, USC grad, decently talented violinist and composer, heads off to New York, organizes a group to play his own music, pushes his way into clubs and arts venues, lands a recording with an upcoming label (New Amsterdam) produces a disc with an irresistibly pretty cover that surely helps get playings (the music is nice, too), comes back to his home town (Carlsbad-by-the-Sea) where his family and all their friends help start a Festival, with his sister handling the p-r even. I went down to the Festival last year, and it was great to see all the Carlsbad townfolks sitting still and admiringly while native-son Matt plied them with some fairly hard-core new music. Maybe that’s what it takes.
   His group is called BUILD, and their disc is on New Amsterdam, a new label. The group has Matt, two other string players, a piano and drums, and I do like their music even if I’m not sure what it is. It’s a kind of indie-rock chamber music, nice open textures, nothing too long, everything nicely shaped, or BUILT if you prefer. The rest of Carlsbad includes the UC-San Diego percussion group, and their program on Saturday night includes John Cage’s madcap “Third Construction” which is one of modern music’s ancestral pieces (and a hoot, besides). Sunday afternoon’s program has John Schneider with the Harry Partch instruments, playing Partch and Lou Harrison. Anybody driving?
   Saturday night here there’s the Rumi concert here to close down the Bowl, with Yo-Yo and the Silk Road people. Next week, all of a sudden, there’s a full plate: Gloria Cheng at Piano Spheres on Tuesday; “Madama Butterfly” (in the Robert Wilson staging, and I understand he’ll actually be here, which makes a difference) on Wednesday; the Philharmonic, with Dawn and Audra (yummm!) on Thursday; LACO on Saturday and Sunday. 

   Bob Attiyeh’s Yarlung Records — which I chastised once after the first release seemed so much a vanity operation, less a valuable addition to the repertory — continues to build an uneven but interesting repertory, recorded and produced with exceptional care to matters of sound and intelligent packaging. Their catalog includes recitals by a number of Philharmonic members: violinist Martin Chalifour, pianist Joanne Pearce Martin  (both of them involved with mostly familiar repertory) and clarinetist David Howard (whose program ventures further afield).
    Howard’s disc includes the Brahms Clarinet Quintet, from the performance a couple of seasons ago with the Philharmonic’s Lyndon Taylor and Kristine Hedwall, John Hayhurst and Gloria Lum, and it is as moving – chilling, even – as I remembered it at the concert. Galina Ustvolskaya’s Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano – with Johnny Lee and Vicki Ray — is the disk’s other major work: strange, grating, intense music, certainly a major personal document by this reclusive pupil of Shostakovich pupil who died, alone, in 2006.2 Short works, agreeable and inconsequential,  by Steven Stucky and Esa-Pekka fill out the disc, both with Vicki Ray.

A weekend in San Francisco involved delayed departures with 90-minute sojourns on airport tarmac in both directions, plus another hour on the return end as maintenance personnel were called in to –- honest! – change a light bulb. On the ground in San Francisco the pleasures were many: dinners at Zuni and the Hayes St. Grill, Dim Sum at Yank Sing, “Simon Boccanegra” at the San Francisco Opera with Dimitri Hrov— (you know who I mean) absolutely stunning in the title role.  I was there, however, for “The Bonesetter’s Daughter,” and that’s another story.
    No, it’s the same story, actually, the collapse by the operatic machine, overcoddled and led astray by that segment of the cultural community that has made it its toy, its billboard, its fashion display. There is no matchup between the artform of the Verdi of Friday night’s opera and the gaudy, self-indulgent circus on Saturday that involved a $million-plus worth of a hack composer, a pretty good bunch of ethnic performers on a stage overlarge for their talent, designers ditto, in a production hyped to the bazooty to the point where you couldn’t even get a toehold into the press room at half-time.  I would love to have seen “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” on one of those little Chinese theaters off Grant Avenue that Lou Harrison, John Cage and, occasionally, I used to visit half a century ago, and enjoy the same excellent singers who are now trapped in a fancy new production ten times too big – Qian Yi with her ghostly, silvery, slithery voice most of all – in this grotesque, misshapen entertainment, as ludicrous a step ahead  for the SF Opera as “The Fly” is for ours.
     David Gockley is the company’s general director, after years and years at the Houston Grand Opera. He hired me once to compile a happy book about HGO’s remarkable achievement in commissioning and performing contemporary opera; the occasion was, I think, Opera No. 25, Carlisle Floyd’s “Cold Sassy Tree.” Floyd’s operas figured considerably in that compilation, in fact; he had even moved to Houston from somewhere else, so as to be closer to his operas. I wonder if he’s gonna move to San Francisco.
     The point is, Gockley’s impressive statistics relate to a taste for easy-listening opera; Stewart Wallace, “Bonesetter’s” composer, is already on that list, twice. Gockley has brought Philip Glass’s “Appomattox” to San Francisco, and now this. Not many Gockley operas ever leap out of their original place of performance, by the way, and turn up somewhere else; you can’t really say that he has enhanced the repertory as Mr. Wagner did from Bayreuth, say. 
    There has to be greater challenge  to an operatic audience than this weak tea somewhere, either in the form of more challenging production values – and I don’t mean the kind of Eurotrash that locates “The Ring” in a bathroom, as in one set of DVDs I confess to owning – or in seriously challenging  music that can move our operatic expectations forward, as “Simon Boccanegra” moved Verdi’s.  Is it too much to wonder out loud, now that Achim Freyer is at work among us, whether his production of Unsuk Chin’s “Alice in Wonderland” might possibly land somewhere? 
    Just wondering.