So I've Heard

POOR BRUNDLE-FLY The bad news from Paris, earlier this year, was fair warning; The Fly, which had first taken flight at the Chtelet Opera, is     one big turkey. At the press conference in Mrs. Chandler’s Pavilion, a week or so ago,  there was Plácido Domingo burbling about operatic masterpiece, composer Howard Shore affecting pride, director David Cronenberg insisting that the opera had no connection with his 1986 film, and the press allowed onstage, a few at a time, to ooh and aah over Dante Ferretti’s giant Laundromats that were supposed to pass for Doctor Brundle’s Teleporters. All the while the music from this wretched excuse for an opera played over the speakers: billows of orchestral sound patterns moving up and down with tuneless conversations superimposed.
       Why do such things happen? I suppose it goes something like this: Howard Shore writes these splendid movie scores.  Lord of the Rings gets turned into a symphony — a huge, pompous-ass symphony that doesn’t for a minute shed its movie-biz identity, but a symphony nevertheless. . Shouldn’t an opera be the next career move? Does it matter that he has no sense at all for a vocal line? How to differentiate between a love-theme and an anger-theme? Apparently nobody thought to ask. Maestro Domingo, whose last foray into contemporary opera was Nicolas and Alexandra, is once again seduced by mediocrity.
     For the 2-1/2 hours of The Fly at the Chandler Pavilion the ear is insulted with words set to music that almost never allows them to take shape. David Henry Hwang (of M. Butterfly) provided the text, which includes a steamy love duet about flesh, flesh and more of same. Sure, the opera has no connection with Cronenberg’s film. How could it? The basic premise, the bodily disintegration that the makeup guys worked so brilliantly upon Jeff Goldblum in the film, is only hinted at in an embarrassing moment when the opera onstage simply stops, and the supertitles, alone, are left to tell the story. When action returns there is Doctor Brundle again, bent over and with a cane but still full size. Call this illusion? I call it cop-out.
      Canadian bass-baritone David Okulitch does a reasonable job as Doctor Brundle, including a few seconds of creditable Full Monty. He also does a couple of back-flips to demonstrate the agilities of the New Flesh (although a double comes on for the sterner stuff). Rumanian soprano Ruxandra Donose is the put-upon Veronica and a couple of minor roles are handled, as well as need be, by Gary Lehman and Beth Clayton. Oh yes, and I almost forgot; the opera ends with the message that brave Veronica is pregnant with Brundle’s child, and has refused an abortion despite the possibility of giving birth to a you-know what. Sequel, anyone? Now that’s what I’d call a horror story. 
   TRIPLE PLOY  Before any of this, and by far the weekend’s better time spent, was the opera’s excursion onto the triple-bill of Puccini one-acters that some put forward as the best of all his music, beautifully planned and led by James Conlon. I cannot argue; Il Tabarro, the first of the set, does indeed have some of his most adventurous music; Gianni Schicchi, the last, is the music I turn to when the old hate-Puccini impulses start to churn. Unfortunately, Suor Angelica, the middle and sad-sister of the three, is one of the works that does, indeed, start those impulses. William Friedkin staged the first two; he had also staged the third, Gianni Schicchi in 2002; now it was someone else’s turn.
      All three short works, so different in narrative and in tone, have in common the plan of a slow, leisurely start through an extended musical landscape; we know these people before their actions coalesce. In Il Tabarro we are offered a remarkable portrait of a Parisian dockside: the barge of Michele and the gathering onshore. The orchestra projects a broad panorama; wonderful little dabs of color evoke the color schemes of Monet and Debussy and remind us of the range of sympathy in Puccini’s late years, when works like Pierrot Lunaire seized his awareness. Lovely moments occur; an organ grinder’s instrument honks out a souvenir of La Bohème.. As sunset turns to dusk, Puccini’s orchestra makes this tangible; it’s one of opera’s great moments, and our company does it well. 
    Mark Delavan is the murderous Michele; Anja Kampe is wavering wife: a superb and superbly matched couple. Salvatore Licitra is the fly in their ointment, and he gets swatted. He was the tenor who stood in for Pavarotti on the night of the Great Cancellation: an okay tenor with a bit of howl.
    Suor Angelica is all sweet atmosphere, and it demands our patience as the young nuns and novices bustle over their cabbages and their chores. Sandra Radvanovsky is the Angelica and she is all drama up to that high C at the end of her big death-aria. But Conlon has had to dig up a second aria, meant by Puccini to follow the big “Senza mamma,” inferior music and, in this context, anti-climactic. It is usually cut, and should be; it prolongs a scene which, considering the brevity of the entire work, was the proper length before.
      Gianni Schicchi is Woody Allen’s show, but not entirely. The opening bit is Woody-sophomoric: a screen with funny Italian words – e.g., “impetigo” – just to be Woody-cute. But that is soon lifted, and Gianni Schicchi has resisted worse than that. It’s a wonderful, boisterous show, staged on a crowded design by Santo Loquasto – a backyard and tenement of any century, any neighborhood – that is really part of the fun. The opera is a great, boisterous boondoggle, a Woody Allen specialty if ever there was. Thomas Allen is the seedy, self-important Schicchi; Laura Tatulescu sings the “Babbino caro” most seductively; and the show is stolen (literally) by nine-year-old Sage Ryan, who in the brief span of this opera picks every pocket and steals every heart.

HURRICANE GUSTAV: At 9:35 on Tuesday night Mahler’s Eighth Symphony unleashed its final blast at the Hollywood Bowl. The performance under Esa-Pekka Salonen was wise and uncommonly civilized: nothing much in the way of offstage effects, serious and, I’ll bet, just a shade reluctant. Yes, reluctant; this is, after all, the one and only Mahler symphony that doesn’t contain a single moment of fun. Salonen’s performance, to its credit, employed nowhere near the proverbial “thousand,” and was the better for it. The great final chorus rang out, this once, brave and magnificent. So, among the soloists, did Christine Brewer. Wow.

THE LEAVING TRAINS OF THE WORLD: It has been a while since we’ve heard anything about the fate of KCSN, the radio outlet of Cal State Northridge once noted for its brave and enterprising programming including an enlightened attitude toward new music beyond that of any other local station. When last heard from KCSN was in the process of denuding itself of most of that distinction. Martin Perlich, its adventurous classical-music programmer, has been banished to that limbo currently well-populated with former arts critics and enterprising program directors. Apparently there is still classical music to be heard on KCSN, weekdays 6-6, but without Martin’s imaginative and aggressive programming. Or so you would suspect, from this recent communication from KCSN’s current general manager to whatever remains of a programming staff.  “Leaving Trains,” the hypothetical work referred to in the second paragraph, is of course the familiar atonal tone-poem by, if memory serves, John Quincy Adams. 

Greetings ~
 
I have just spoken with the administration regarding several issues, one in particular is
our daily classical programming. Please keep up the great work that we have come to
know and love about your daily presentations. I ask that you now become extra sensitive
when it comes to the more adventurous and contemporary music in our library. I do not
wish to draw a line in the sand and prohibit any one kind of music, but at this juncture I
ask that you program the “minimalists” and  “21st Century” music with less frequency.
 
It is your call, and from what I’ve heard not all new music is “difficult listening”. But please
stay away from the “Leaving Trains” and the “Phrygian Gates” of the world. Dig into the
wealth of Early, Romantic, Classical, and mainstream selections that thrive in our library.
 
If you don’t understand what I am attempting to relay to you then talk to me. My wish is
to have you pull back from the “extreme adventurous” to the “mainstream enjoyable”. And
I trust your judgment completely.
 
With new leadership and change management comes a fresh new direction. Our library is
rather large so please dig in and have fun. And let’s keep the channels of communication open.
I realize that this is a matter of one’s personal opinion so if you have questions or doubts run
them by me.
 
Thanks again for your great work.
 
Fred
 
Frederick D. Johnson
KCSN General Manager

At the Bowl last week Edo de Waart sent in one of his frequent cancellations; instead there was the utterly charming and quite splendid Shi-Yeon Sung who, from the moment of her management of Wagner’s “Meistersinger” Prelude on through a sticky evening gave a splendid account of herself. She is the Boston Symphony’s assistant conductor; one can only hope that this new generation of exceptional young assistants – our own Lionel Bringuier included – will outlast this dangerous trend of orchestral demise that stalks the land. Ms. Song has a handsome stick technique; in a thickish program ending with the Brahms First, and with the usual lack of real rehearsal time, she made the Philharmonic sound bright and chipper. In the middle there was the Schumann Piano Concerto, one of those works I unhesitatingly regard as perfect; So it sounded this night, with the young Sa Chen as soloist, in a collaboration that gave off waves of joyousness.

Forty years ago this week. at New York Magazine, Clay Felker 
allowed me to get away with an entire music column in 
rhyming doggerel. Bob Grossman supplied the artwork, 
which I continue to use, in Bob’s color upgrade. He 
asked me about the original text, so this is for him. 
Rudi and Julius were the opera honchos in 1968; 
Sargeant and Haggin were stuck-in-the-mud critics, 
the Bernheimers of their day. That’s Lennie 
on my typewriter. 

A ho! For September, with anticipation
Of concerts and operas, a season of cheer.
A toast to the autumn with joy and elation
As music resoundeth, piled right up to here.

The critics, all rested, their bon mots are sharp’ning
For Lennie, and Rudi, and Julius, and you,
Dear readers. We listen to all that is happ’ning
And try to relate everything we’ve been through.

For Julius and troupe there’s a birthday to honor,
Of twenty-five years full of struggle and pain.
They’ve got a new “Faust” (man, that opera’s a goner),
At least it’s a way to get out of the rain.

And Beverly Sills will sing Manon to charm us
(The Met’s digging up the same opera, I see.)
And Rudi can rage, throw a tantrum enormous,
But His “Manon” stinks, just between you and me.

Sing ho! Lincoln Center, Bill Schuman and minions,
With four pretty buildings and one on the way.
They lunch all the critics and woo our opinions,
It’s part of a game that we graciously play.

And Lennie is fifty; he’s leaving, he’s tired.
His job’s up for grabs, a most difficult choice.
The applicants, all of them greatly admired,
Will have to excel in both Boulez and Boyce.

The orchestra’s dead, or the orchestra’s dying;
The audience thinks all the moderns are trash.
They may be, but surely a handful are trying,
But they’re not the ones who go home with the cash.

So Ormandy comes and he plays all-Tchaikovsky,
And Leinsdorf shows up with a Schumann or two,
While Babbitt and Cage and that chap Davidowsky
Retreat to the hinterlands, clever but blue.

So ho! Winthrop Sargeant and Haggin and others…
They’re deeply insulted by tones numb’ring twelve.
The music they like was enjoyed by their mothers;
Into anything new they reluctantly delve.

At Carnegie, which I recall from pre-puberty,
The coffee is sour, acoustics are fine.
Fischer-Dieskau  will come with a program all Schuberty;
If you want to buy tickets you’d best get on line.

Upstairs in Recital Hall kids from all  over
Give New York debuts with their eyes full of hope.
A tiny percentage will land in the clover;
The rest will go home to St. Louis and mope.

But let them not stop; they’re the ones that excite us:
The youngsters creative, ambitious and strong.
They bring in the new blood; the pathways they light us
To musical futures, to which they belong.

Then ho! To the future; it’s got to be better!
Without this assurance we couldn’t go on.
Dame Fortune will smile on us; please, someone, let her.
The musical season looks rosy at dawn

BRUNDIBAR AGAIN. Five years ago the L.A. Opera’s Opera Camp project staged this endearing small  concentration-camp relic at a church in Santa Monica. Since then the work – by Hans Krasa, to a libretto by Adolf Hoffmeister, has had a career of its own. There’s a picture book by the eminent designer Maurice Sendak, which has also inspired the décor for stage productions. The story, if you can call it that, tells of how the children of the village outshouted the village minstrel (Brundibar by name), so that people threw money at them and made it possible for Little Joe to buy milk for his ailing mother. Okay? There is now a prequel, “Friedl,” centered around  the artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, with music by Eli Villanueva. Take a deep breath now, while I sort out  some history, in case you just got here.
   “Brundibar” was composed  and performed in the Jewish quarter of Prague sometime between 1938 and 1941. A copy of the score was smuggled into the concentration camp at Teresienstadt (Terezin), where it was performed frequently by camp children under Krasa’s direction. The Nazis maintained the Terezin camp as something of a showpiece, with a busy performing-arts program and lots of clean toilets to impress the visiting press. There was a famous “Brundibar” performance at the camp before a group of Red Cross inspectors, in June, 1944, which apparently earned the camp a clean bill of health, except that the majority of the “specimen” inmates put up for inspection were among the next trainloads shipped out to the Auschwitz gas ovens immediately after the inspectors departed. 
   The role of The Cat at Terezin was taken by a child who survived, and who is now Mrs. Ela Weissberger, who has derived a lovely second existence out of her wretched childhood. At Terezin the young Ela attended classes by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Mrs. Weissberger has now made a new life attending performances of “Brundibar” and delivering a delightful post-performance memoir. That’s what she did at Disney Hall’s REDCAT this weekend, as “Brundibar” returned – no Sendak sets, but with stage direction by Eli Villanueva on a make-do set as in 2003, and with James Conlon himself conducting three of the four performances. (Daniel Faltus, who led the fourth, was the conductor in ’03.) For Conlon this revival is, of course, congruent with his ongoing “Recovered Voices” project, to restore the suppressed repertory, worthy or otherwise, of music denied its place under the Nazi shadow. For “Brundibar” the word is, I’m afraid,  “otherwise,” but I would not send back a minute of my Saturday morning spent with these spirited, greatly talented, splendidly directed kids who, I was told, worked up this solid hour of sheer stage exhilaration in something like eleven days’  rehearsals. If this is what “Opera Camp” was been turning out over these past five years I wish they’d keep me better informed. Certainly the repertory of really good operas for and with children – by Britten, for starters – can make this an adjunct of enormous value.

FLASH IN THE PAN: Let me recall a Friday afternoon at Boston’s Symphony Hall, 1942 or thereabouts: an unknown soloist, an unknown concerto: William Kapell playing the  Khatchaturian. Friday-afternoon Boston Symphony audiences were the epitome of restraint: some pitter-pattering applause at the end of a piece; never between movements. Something weird took place that afternoon, however: applause  (horror!) between movements and, would you believe, cheers. Sure enough, that piece had all the right grease, all right. It was – and is – made up entirely of  spare parts: Borodin-plus-hootchy-kootch, good writing for fast moving fingers. The only recording I owned, I think I bought because the names were so right: Moura Lympany, Anatole Fistoulari — say them aloud, over and over. Sixty years later,  Khatchaturian’s greasy concerto has practically disappeared from the catalogs; a single Russian recording remains.. 
    I have the feeling that Jean-Yves Thibaudet, with his built-in magic charm machine, has the chops to stage a comeback for this alluring, brainless showpiece.; it’s quite the match. (Ah, don’t ask why!) He’s been playing it around this summer, and he brought it to the Bowl last week. Why not? It’s exactly tailored to the Thibaudet persona: the mauve jacket with the silky-satin overlay, the gold-and-silver slippers; more solid gold in the hairwash. Thibaudet is our resident playboy; the new “Gramophone” chooses his Ravel over all others, which I find hard to believe until I discover that the obvious alternatives as superb Ravel performers on disc – Uchida, Aimard – do not exist.
   I guess you could call Thibaudet on Khatchaturian a great performance of its kind. Those fingers at work — on the video screens, it was like  watching some of those old Soviet films the Philharmonic ran a year or so ago of marvelous machinery getting ready for World War II. On the podium was the Philharmoic’s immensely talented assistant conductor Lionel Bringuier, whose role – in this work at least – could be compared to that of a weathervane in a typhoon.

IT WAS A FOREGONE CONCLUSION  that Mark. Swed and I would hear entirely different music at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday night, under the title of the Philip Glass Violin Concerto; we acknowledged as much in our pre-concert greeting. The important point is that we can remain friends over such matters. My life in this criticking business has been punctuated by the sneers and snarls of those – you don’t want to know their names –who would ascribe deep motivations of evil intent  to those who seek to tread upon their artistic tastes or express opinions of their own.
   Mark’s encomium in today’s Times has the expected eloquence and dedication; if there are six (or sixty) recordings of Philip’s Violin Concerto I am sure he has heard them all and knows their differences by heart. Since I find sameness of musical discourse one of the work’s major earmarks, I share his awe that Martin Chalifour, the Philharmonic’s noble concertmaster and the soloist the other night, did indeed learn the concerto to play it by heart. 
    The Concerto, I will allow, is quite an astonishing work for all its emptiness. It moves forward with a lithe arrogance, offensive in its very assurance. I will grant its slow movement extra points; this is a big and impressive structure whose building blocks are clearly evident – a massive descending four-note figure – and which, of all three movements, seems most nearly the right length for what it has to say. (You see what a fine gentleman I am: I’m allowing for the possibility that the Philip Glass Violin Concerto has something to say.) Leonard Slatkin, who conducted, tied himself in knots trying to describe interesting correspondences between the Concerto and Elgar’s ”Enigma” Variations, which followed. I didn’t even try.
THREE NIGHTS BEFORE, “Les Miserables” had something to say, all right. I’ve seen operas and stage shows at the Bowl, and salivated enviously at the pictures in the Bowl Museum of the great old shows of the past – Max Reinhardt’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” most of all, which later became a movie (now finally on DVD) with Mickey Rooney as Puck – but last week’s production has to be the best use of that space I’ve yet seen. No, it didn’t match the awesome moment in a real theater of the scene at the Barricades, or Javert’s suicide into the sewer, but it came amazingly close, with live and video joining into valuable theatrical enhancement. The cast was over-all superb; the tiny Gavroche was someone you’d want to spread on a brioche and swallow whole.
  And for what? The music remains a glorious, juicy cheat. Not since Quixote’s “Impossible Dream” have the time-signatures of 6/8 and 9/8 been so blatantly overstressed in a musical score to wrench shivers and tears from an audience. My love-hate affair with “Les Miz” goes far back to the first London run; I can’t shake it. The kids at Hamilton High won me over with their production a few months ago; theirs was a snappier, more light-hearted show. This one had me shivering and in tears. I can’t wait for the next.
NEXT DAY: Santa Barbara beckoned, as it always does this weekend, as the Music Academy of the West ends its summer festival with a staged opera in the creaky old Lobero Theater. Everybody shows up, pushing one another aside to get a hug from Marilyn Horne – who runs the voice program there — and whoever else of major importance shows up. Bill Bolcom was on hand this time; people said that his opera, “A Wedding,” was better done by the Santa Barbara students than it had by the Chicago Lyric. Could be; it was a bright, bouncy show.
  It’s the Robert Altman comic film: dysfunctional families colliding as they interlock at a wedding. (Wasn’t there a Bollywood movie about this, too?)  Bolcom is splendidly multi-phasic, and he sets up a glorious confusion of musical interweave that bustles and surges and now and then comes to rest with a lovely love song. I don’t see a professional career for his opera; it seems exactly right for talented students to use for great fun, which is what happened in Santa Barbara. Worth the trip.

CONDUCTORS A TO Z: It has been a while since I’ve been to the Cabrillo Festival, at least the 17 years of Marin Alsop’s time since this was my first first encounter with her work there. Santa Cruz apparently loves her, a contrast to the protests she ran into at her appointment to the Baltimore Symphony. She has built a valuable festival of middle-distance contemporary music; the statistics of world and U.S. premieres are impressive so long as you allow the likes of John Corigliano and Christopher Rouse into the new-music category. Cabrillo began – in a coffee shop called the Sticky Wicket – in 1961, through the efforts of Lou Harrison and the poet Robert Hughes. It maintained an experimental, PacificRim-facing personality as long as Lou was around. It found a larger home at Cabrillo College in ’63; now it uses the basketball arena optimistically called the Civic Auditorium, where open windows supply the only air conditioning. It deserves better. The two nights I was there it drew good crowds; the town surrounded the hall with festive food stands and the like. “Keep Santa Cruz Weird” is a familiar bumper strip, and Cabrillo measured up to the cry. 
   Chris Rouse’s music is – well – “modern but likable” as some people like to measure. His “Concerto for Orchestra,” which had its world premiere at Cabrillo, starts off with trumpets aspin (a little like that famous great measure in “Daphnis et Chloe”) and runs a good half-hour through emphatic, correctly dissonant music that leaves your shoelaces tied but lets you know you’ve been Somewhere. This was his eleventh concerto, and Cabrillo has heard them all. Corigliano, another master of the correct gesture, was on hand with “Conjurer,” a concerto for the famous percussionist Evelyn Glennie, something of a drypoint exercise if truth be known. I missed the good old days, with Glennie cavorting at top speed through a vast display of orchestral hardware; this one had her hammering away at one section at a time – woods, metals, skinheads. Perhaps becoming a “Dame” has slowed her down. 
   Smaller works filled in the programs: “Darkness Made Visible,” an attractive orchestral interlock of one thing and another by 18-year-old USC student Eric Lindsay; Mason Bates’ “Liquid Interface,” blending a familiar electronic vocabulary into the orchestra; David Sanford’s “Scherzo Grosso,” allowing a workout for show-off cellist Matt Haimovitz.. The festival concludes this Sunday (8/10) with a concert at the Mission San Bautista, a little way up U.S. 101 from Santa Cruz; you can hear four more premieres and see the spot where Kim Novak toppled down in ”Vertigo.”
   At the other end of the alphabet, I’ve always harbored a special liking for Christian Zacharias, India-born, Germany-raised, superb conductor, pianist, chamber musician. Tuesday night he had his first stint at the Hollywood Bowl and, from his disarming short speech, seemed somewhat overwhelmed by the surroundings. Well might he be; a crowd of nearly 11,000 on a Tuesday night, with only himself as soloist, suggests that there’s still hope for us all. Beethoven was the matter at hand, the gentle C-major Piano Concerto, the sublime “Pastoral” Symphony, “Coriolanus.” It was all beautiful, the orchestra in excellent balance, the oboe of Ariana Ghez and the bassoon of Shawn Mouser – the pillars of Beethoven’s scoring in those particular works – in particularly loving balance. For an audience, Zacharias is hard to watch; he does not so much stroke an orchestra as pump it vigorously with both arms; whatever the technique, he achieves results. He has another program tonight, ending with the blithe, unflappable C-major Symphony of Bizet, music not very important perhaps, but perfect.

P.S. The capital of Mongolia is Ulan Bator, not Kuala Lumpur. Even the sun has spots.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS FROM TODAY’S MAIL
 Q.   Hello Alan,
I’m a freelance writer (and former editor) with Symphony magazine, doing a story about the recent rounds of layoffs and cutbacks of classical music critics and other arts critics at print publications. It’s a kind of big-picture look at what this means for arts journalism now and in the future, and what it means for some of the writers involved.
Of course, you have some firsthand experience with the subject, and have launched your own web site/blog as a response.  I’m curious to hear what you think of launching a blog at this point in your career. How did you get it started and what do you think of the differences, if any in blog postings and commentary. Are you hearing from readers? I know you’ve been through lots of rounds of staff reductions/dramas at newspapers over the years. That said, are we really seeing the end of music criticism in print, as so many are saying, or is this just another round of media world machinations? How healthy is it for cities to have only one critic, if any at all, devoted to classical music coverage?
 A.    Hi Rebecca. Interesting you should ask.
The situation right now is at its worst. Not only because critics are losing their jobs right and left, but because the field is being pared in so brutal a fashion. It is far worse for a city to end up with one single critic, no matter how competent or how well-positioned, than none; the only way for criticism to work is as a forum of some sort, whether it be four guys on the NYTimes or me versus Mark Swed in L.A.. This network of small dictatorships reduces the field to a lot of interlocking blather. All these blogs right now are a kind of Babel, but the small-talk guys, the guys that used to shoot off in the record stores and now have access to websites, will soon run out of steam, and the few worthwhile websites — Alex’s, best of all — will survive as the new source for musical intelligence. The fact that schools like USC are actually training arts critics these gloomy days is a good sign; there’s a chance that the art will survive. Just the fact that I maintain my own blog in close contact with a few hundred  readers who respond constantly — if only to help me with spelling and fact-checking — tells me that there is a readership for criticism. We will step out over the blabbermouths and, maybe, survive. Alan
 ANOTHER Q    Though it’s six months away, I wanted to personally get in touch about Stephanie Barron’s upcoming German Cold War show. This one promises to be as innovative as her two previous German presentations, at least one of which I know you covered. Please do let me know if I can provide further information or arrange a conversation between you and Stephanie.
Best regards,
Allison
(Press release attached.)
Allison Agsten, Director, Press Relations
LACMA 
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
A.  Thanks for this advance information. It would be interesting to learn whether LACMA plans any kind of musical program to correlate to this material; the period did produce some important music. (The name of H. P. Zimmermann, whose “Soldaten” was just produced at the Lincoln Center Festival, comes first to mind.) Unfortunately, now that LACMA has self-destructed as a producer of serious musical events I have my doubts. Could you elucidate? Alan
Q.  I’ve just heard back from our music department. We have programming for
Basquiat, African Art, Hearst, Pompeii, and possibly one other, though
likely not Art of Two Germanys.
Allison Agsten
A.  yes, that figures

JAMES: Somebody on the radio recently, I forget who, was talking about James Thurber, to the effect that “nobody reads this great man anymore.” I had this book in my lap, open to page 171:
  “The woan, so-called because he woaned, was frequently seen, four or five hundred years ago, in larders and bureau drawers. Many people also saw him in their cups. Scarcely larger than a small blue cream pitcher, the woan had three buttons on the vest of his Sunday suit, and was given to fanning his paws at spindrift. He built his nest of gum wrappers and violin bows, which gave it rougly the shape of a gum-wrapped violin bow. The woan was capable of only one sound, a low, mournful ‘goodle-goodle.’ I miss him.”
JAY: There is a Norm’s at the head of my street; I go there often because it’s close. The food ranges from terrible to blah, but there’s an edible fish dish and a couple of salads I can cope with. I’ve struck up a friendship with one of the waiters. His name is Jay; it’s really Javkhlangere, or something like that, but that’s impossible. He’s from Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Mongolia. He, his sister and their mother emigrated here five years ago; his sister also works at Norm’s, and I cannot pronounce her name, either. They’re both tall, strikingly handsome, extremely thin, and with a skull configuration – I looked it up – that is distinct to people from that region.
  Anyhow, Jay asked could he come over and have me look at his English writing and I said sure and then I offered to take him to a Hollywood Bowl concert and he said sure. His musical awareness was strictly hip-hop, about which he knew quite a lot; he played me some tapes that ween’t all THAT bad. A few nights ago, I packed a picnic pack including my one Chinese outdoor specialty, Pon-Pon Chicken (which does include some drops of Mongolian Hot Oil). Jay knew something about the Bowl, but when we stepped inside and caught the first view of the expanse he came close to collapse. I’ve escorted many blasé out-of-towners to their first Bowl experience; this was different.
The program that night was the more-or-less complete “Carmen,” Jay’s first encounter with classical music, certainly his  first opera. Total conquest; Bramwell Tovey’s glib plot summary may have done the job for the rest of 9,000-or-so attendees; within Box 1031, mine was the narration that prevailed. At the end – and yes, we stayed to the end – two things: 1)Jay thanked me in a way that sounded as if he really meant it and 2)he began plans to take his girl friend to the Bowl as soon as she returns from Mongolia.
   This, by the way, was a great night as well for Denyce Graves, a long way removed from the spook-infested “Carmen” that first brought her here  in 1992. Those who will proclaim her THE Carmen of our generation will find no argument here; her voice has developed the stride, the insinuation, the rich sexual power inherent in the role; even in the hampered setting on the Bowl stage hers was a Carmen of full drama. Not so Stuart Skelton,  alas, her Don José of the sliding scale, lending new meaning to the four-letter word known as “wimp.” As recompense there was the haunting, immensely touching Micaëla of Jessica Rivera, greatly illuminating what must still be the most useless role in all opera. Tovey’s version bled from many  cuts, some welcome some disgraceful. 
JABBERJABBER: There is a kind of writing, engaged in by people elevated to important jobs and  in need of sounding important – I think there’s a Thurber drawing somewhere of that species  –  that consists of showing up on the job with a large bag of words and not leaving until you’ve used them all. I got the sinking feeling after reading Mr. Schultz’s review of the Mozart concert at the Bowl last week that the Times had hatched a new practitioner of the art, so soon after cutting Mr. Pasles loose. Then I remembered that Mr. Schultz pals around with Mr. M-rm-lst-n, who is a very old practitioner, and that explains everything.

MARTHA: “I hope he likes me,” says Martha Argerich of Robert Schumann, and it makes you think more intensely about both of them: this  elusive musician who moves through our world as though in a world of her own; this musician of the centuries past whose best music always seems to have him talking to himself in the way that finally led him to madness. When she plays his music there is, indeed, a closeness; two impenetrable boundaries seem to dissolve, to merge. I  thought of this before; there are a number of EMI discs of  Argerich playing Schumann – solo works or chamber music with friends, taken from live performances – that have that unusual quality of oneness that go beyond any other performances I have heard, and sometimes even make music I had once considered dul come alive.
   What this is all about is another of those documentary DVDs that have come along from the excellent offices of Naxos, Martha Argerich, Evening Talks by Georges Cachot.  Musically the film is a collecion of scraps of Argerich performances, none very long, but all of them interesting enough in their range: Martha at 15 coping with Liszt (in a recording that aroused the wonder of Vladimir Horowitz),; Martha dealing with Chopin in Warsaw in 1965 (where she would later create a stir, resigning from the 1980 Competition jury in protest over the downgrading of Ivo Pogorelic) ; Martha in  2001, gently impatient with the German chamber orchestra coping with her view of the Schumann Concerto. 
   The conversations are what holds the film together; they are soft, immensely appealing, not at all the Matha I would have epected from  say, that cannonade of a performance of Prok 3 she gave here last year. Director Gachot is – I assume that’s he – is an attractive interlocutor, and he has put fireball Martha at her ease. More accessible and self-revealing than I would have expected, she talks of her fear of Beethoven; she will never brave the mountain that is the Fourth Concerto, finding satisfaction in the milder-mannered Second.  I like what Alex Ross wrote about her, that “her native language is music.” She sounds like someone I would like to meet. I wouldn’t have thought so before.
TONY: I can’t leave the matter of Tony Palmer with that awful Puccini film I curled my lip at last week; his hourlong documentary of Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony, The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs has me utterly undone. Yes, I know; Palmer has done everything imaginable to underscore the work’s arrogant appeal to the sentiments. The performance under David Zinman, with Dawn Uoshaw’s heartbreaking intoning of the graffiti texts (tiny, self-contained tragedies from the walls of prison camps, or so it says) runs entirely counter – in tempo, expression and mood – to the composer’s own recorded versions. Everything is wrong, yet everything works: the strange case of a composition with a double life.
   The astute documentarian, Palmer sees to it that none of this matters. Comfortable at his piano, Górecki intones all the proper phrases about oppression and redemption and the life of an illustrious one-composition composer. Palmer has him stumbling along snowy train tracks through the Auschwitz prison yard, and intersperses the playing of David Zinman’s orchestra with the horrors of boneyards and starving children. One shot I cannot forgive: a small African boy, his mouth wreathed in flies; fade to the sequins on Dawn Upshaw’s gown in exactly the same pattern. Enough!

They’re still making discs, and probably always will. Here is EMI’s disc of the threee Stravinsky Symphonies done by Simon Rattle and his Berlin Philharmonic people – keen, incisive, aloof music-making, something of the perfect machine. I’m even happier that the small companies persist, that our own Gloria Cheng has made a splendid disc for TelArc and that a local composer named Matt McBane – yes, he happens to be a friend, and his Mom grows the best blackberries I’ve ever tasted – has made a disc of his music that I can’t stop listening to, on an even smaller label called New Amsterdam.
   Gloria is a matter of local pride. . If you go to three new-music concerts, she’ll have played at two of them. Instead of disappearing into the New York morass she works hard at creating a Los Angeles awareness; this new disc should help in this regard. Its composers – Witold Lutoslawski in particular, but also Steve Stucky and Esa-Pekka Salonen – were and are transients to some degree, but their music is also locally important. Hearing nearly an hour of  their music, their colors nicely shaped by Cheng who, after all, has lived close to all of it for some time, yo can’t help sensing some kind of common language and, above all, a huge, bursting vitality that says something about Los Angeles music-making, to its greater Gloria. The works by Salonen – Yta II, a show-off piece from 1985 against the Dichotomie of 2000 – encapsulate the emergence of a compositional wisdom.
    Matt McBane got out of USC a couple of years ago and hasn’t stopped. He headed for New York, gathered some players around him – he’s a violinist and the others are also string players or percussionists. They called themselves Build, and the stuff Matt and the others concocted is an attractive meld of – well, I’m not sure; it’s a kind of chamber music, sort of jazzy, and kicky, and one piece on this disk is just simply pretty, what a boy might compose for his Mom just for Reassurance. Matt also runs a festival on the California Coast, in Carlsbad; the ensembles that come include the Calder Quartet and So Percussion, and some of what they performed last summer was this same nondescript, very attractive, and very pleasing to Moms. I’m not a Mom, and I had the feeling at Carlsbad last summer that I was accepting the up-front seduction of this music more easily than I should. And it’s the same with this new disk also called, simply,  “Build.” Sometimes you can’t help yourself.
DOWNLOAD: Go to www.bobedwardsradio.com and download Bob Edwards’ conversation with Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” – the song and Marcus’ book about it.  The broadcast date was July 20, 2005, on XM Radio; it’s still available. . I downloaded it at the time, and return to it often as the most insightful broadcast conversation I have ever heard. I played it again today, for no particular reason.  I only installed XM Satellite Radio (in my car) to listen to Bob Edwards’ interviews.