So I've Heard

Music of a poignant beauty almost beyond the reach of mere words, achieved with
means so simple that they, too, disappear in the telling: that was the essence
of a most extraordinary concert on Wednesday night at Saint Basil’s Church in
downtown Los Angeles. The performers were Paul Hillier’s newly formed ensemble
called Theater of Voices; the music, all of it, was by the Estonian-born Arvo
Part, including the first American performance of his “Berlin Mass,” composed
in and for that city last May.
Part (pronounced “pairt”) has achieved a following through a small handful of
recordings, many of them performed by his fellow Estonian Neeme Jarvi, or by
Hillier. They cover a broad spectrum; a recording of his three symphonies, by
Jarvi on the B-I-S label, shows the work of an ardent atonalist and a skilled
handler of great gobs of orchestral violence. More recently, however, Part’s
music has taken a turn toward the austere, with performing forces cut down to
small instrumental or vocal groups. His “Passio,” a setting of the story of
the Crucifixion, recorded by Hillier with his previous vocal group, the
Hilliard Ensemble, is an hour of enthralling, quiet, slow-moving music of
utmost emotional impact, seemingly hovering on the edge of silence.
The music on Wednesday’s concert, including several short religious works, two
brief organ solos, and the 25-minute Mass, was of like quality. Included among
the short works were three vocal pieces — in English, Latin and ancient
Slavonic — so transparent in texture that the slightest change of harmony
seemed cataclysmic. The Mass, of all the works, seemed to waver enchantingly
between very old and very new styles. The simple word settings, mostly
syllable-by-syllable, note-by-note, had some of the quality of old church
hymns. But there were moments — the radiant, bell-like harmonies at the start
of the “Gloria” linger in the memory — when all sense of time disappeared.
This was music at its most elemental, stripped down to its central expressive
core.
An ensemble of four singers — the extraordinary soprano Pat Forbes, alto Mary
Nichols, tenor Paul Agnew, baritone Hillier with Christopher Bowers-Broadbent
on the small, clear St. Basils organ — was all Hillier needed to recreate the
wonder of this strangely austere yet impassioned music.
The church itself, with its Franco Assetto bas-reliefs of the Stations of the
Cross that also, like the music, seem to bestride very old and very new art,
was the perfect setting. Credit MaryAnn Bonino, once again, for her special
skill, in these “Chamber Music in Historic Sites” concerts, to effect the
ideal merging of sight and sound.

With a feat of transformation worthy to stand beside the changeover from
Superman to Clark Kent, the volcanic force behind the delights of P.D.Q. Bach
on Monday night became, one night later, just plain Peter Schickele. The
result: new realms of delight.
Schickele, Swarthmore and Juilliard trained, had already made his name as a
serious composer before the invention of the P.D.Q. mealticket in 1965. On
Tuesday night in a small theater on the Brentwood campus of Mount Saint Mary’s,
the Armadillo Quartet, a splendid local group of freelance musicians founded in
1980, performed Schickele’s entire quartet repertory to
and a piece called “Music for an Evening” for quartet and piano duet (with
Schickele and Guy Hallman as pianists). Charming, modest music it was,full of
bright, kicky energy.
In defining his chosen musical style, Schickele would have to rank as a
conservative. His music uses familiar harmonic progressions in familiar ways.
It also dips into popular American idioms, including a kind of elementary jazz
and a fair amount of bluegrass. It comes up, in most cases, with results that
are thoroughly original.
The works on Tuesday’s program were all fairly recent, the earliest dating from
1982. One of the quartets, by the way, has been recorded, a work subtitled
“American Dreams.” This, the first of the quartets, proved the most
ingratiating. The middle movement, a long, slow evocation of a remembered
birdcall at dawn in upstate New York, might fairly be thought of, in fact, as
gorgeous. The other movements, including a set of jazz studies and a whole
bluegrass movement, had their charms as well.
If there are clear points of reference in this music, it seemed to point to the
rustic, outwardly simple but profound music of Leos Janacek. That is meant as a
compliment, by the way.
The concert drew a small crowd, including both Schickele and P.D.Q. Bach
groupies who had assembled in town because of Monday night’s P.D.Q. farewell.
Bill Walters, who has served P.D.Q. Bach as stage manager since the start,
noted that this was the first Schickele concert where he could sit out front
with his wife.
Schickele delivered some valuable insights in his spoken program notes. He
made no effort to conceal the fact that has been the most apparent in all his
work: that he is one of the world’s great spontaneous humorists, and an honest
and attractive musician as well.

The true believers already know the scene by heart.Monday night at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, a few minutes past 8. A capacity
crowd stirs in anticipation. The unitiated are a little restless, but the
Believers know the order of events. A sleepy-eyed stage manager shuffles out,
glowers at the crowd, blows into the microphone and shuffles back. The
Believers hiss and boo.
The stage manager returns. Professor Schickele, he announces, has become lost.
He was due here in Glendale long ago. (Glendale??? groan the uninitiated.) But
now it looks as if we’ll have to canc…
A hullabaloo in the lobby, a rush down the aisle. Times were when Peter
Schickele, self-proclaimed Professor of Musicological Pathology at the
University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, discoverer of and amanuensis
(sidekick, to you) to the ignoble P.D.Q. Bach (1807-1742), “last but least of
J.S.Bach’s 20-odd children,” made his famous belated entrances down a high
wire, but that was many years and many pounds ago. Now, at 55, he zoooooms down
the aisle, his concert clothes half-on half-off, his huge yellow workman’s
shoes flailing furiously, the image of a deranged Rasputin trying to look like
Brahms.
Will the concert now begin? Not quite. His breath regained, Schickele returns
to the podium. “There’s a change in the program,” he announces. “May we have
the house lights up, please?”
He directs the audience’s attention to a certain line on a certain page. “You
see that comma in the third line? Well, that has to be changed. It’s supposed
to be a semi-colon.”
Like every detail in these gloriously wise and antic P.D.Q. Bach outings,
Schickele takes this matter of the typos very seriously. If you’d been
backstage an hour before concert time, you’d have found Schickele and his crew,
including the selfsame stage manager, Bill Walters, poring through the night’s
printed program. “I’ve made it a point of honor,” he said in a phone
conversation last week, “never to plant a typo in my own material, but to rely
on the rest of the booklet.”
Has he ever been unable to find one? “One time in San Francisco, we came
close. In desperation, I started to check the printed list of San Francisco
Symphony patrons. I saw one name, Macdonald, with a small d in the middle. Now
I know you can spell it that way, but I had a hunch. Sure enough, after sending
someone to the Symphony office to check, it turned out that it should have been
a capital D. The day was saved!”
And yet, with all that thrill of the chase, and the blessings that the antics
of P. D. Q. Bach have bestowed on deliriously delighted audiences since that
first joint appearance in Manhattan’s Town Hall in April, 1965, Schickele is
about to retire his sterling creation. Monday’s concert will mark the finale of
the collaboration, at least for now. “I’m not calling it a farewell tour,”
said Schickele, “because the next step would be to call it the first annual
farewell tour. I like the idea of indefinite sabbatical, instead.”
The time and place for the grqnd finale are appropriate. Monday is, after all,
April Fool’s Day, which P.D.Q. has, naturally, taken over as his birthday.
Pasadena is equally appropriate. Jorge Mester, currently conductor of the
Pasadena Symphony, was on the podium for P.D.Q.’s debut in 1965, and he will be
on the podium for the finale as well.
The auspices were favorable, at the birth of P.D.Q. Bach. After a time of
musical wandering that included a stint as resident composer in the Los Angeles
Public School system, Schickele ended up at the Juilliard School, “majoring in
cafeteria.” Around a cafeteria table Schickele and some pals — including
Mester and fellow composers Philip Glass and Richard Peaslee — swapped jokes
and wisecracks and doodled some parodies on the more ludicrous aspects of
strict musicology.
Suddenly there was a repertory: a marvelous piece called “Quodlibet” which
played off unlikely tune combinations (“Tea for Two” on top of the Beethoven
Seventh Symphony, for example) and a “Concerto for Horn and Hardart” of which
the name alone was hilarious enough. (Horn & Hardart was the corporate name of
the East Coast restaurant chain better known as Automats.) Schickele, whose
personal musical gods always included both Mozart and Spike Jones, endowed his
new creation with both influences in equal measure. Someone among his friends
and relatives back home in Fargo, North Dakota, came up with the name of
P.D.Q.; Schickele is no longer sure who it was.
The Hardart, a glorious assemblage of noisemakers that would do a Rube Goldberg
proud, was the stellar attraction at the first concert; where is it now?
“Mostly, in my basement in Brooklyn,” said Schickele. “Unfortunately, it’s
in pretty bad shape, because we’ve cannibalized many parts over the years. I
don’t think we could rebuild it. That would mean finding a mixing bowl in A-
flat, for example, or a toy wind-up owl in B-flat. They make those things out
of plastic nowadays, and they don’t make music the way the old ones did.”
No, you’ll never see the Hardart in a concert any more. After Monday night
there’s not much chance, for that matter, of another virtuoso coming along who
can match the virtuosity of the Schickele-P.D.Q. team on the Schlagenfrappe —
a set of cardboard mailing tubes of various sizes played by bounding them off
your head — or the Tuba Mirum (“mere tube), a length of hosepipe filled with
wine.
You’ll miss the live performances of the Cantata “Iphigenia in Brooklyn,”
with its deathless line “only he who is running knows” followed by an aria
based on just those last two words. Or the “Howdy” Symphony, P.D.Q.’s rebuff
to Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony. Or the “1712 Overture,” which puts “Yankee
Doodle” through the same treatment that Tchaikovsky imposed on Russian
folktunes in his “1812.” Or the grand oratorio “Oedipus Tex” or…
We have it all on records, of course. What sets Schickele and his creation
ahead of certain less responsible entertainers who dine well off the inherent
inanities in classical music is this: he is musical, and he is honest.
And after you’ve gone through the records, there is the video of P.D.Q.’s
magnum opus (to date, anyhow), the opera “The Abduction of Figaro,” a
superbly observed Mozartian pastiche (including characters named not only Papa
Geno but also Mama Geno). Unperformed here since its 1984 premiere, the work is
eminently worth any impresario’s attention
If there is an archetypal figure behind the art of P.D.Q., it is Mozart
himself, whose boyhood scores were full of the little cadential cliches that
pop up sidewise in such P.D.Q. masterworks as the “Schleptet,” a brilliantly
observed takeoff that has become a repertory piece on its own. Later in his own
career, Mozart set down the music that clearly prophesied the coming of P.D.Q.
Bach, the sextet known as “A Musical Joke,” which purposely and deliciously
falls into exactly the same compositional traps that Schickele and his pal
would dig anew two centuries later.
And Schickele’s great accomplishment beyond the keenness of these musical
observations is that he has emerged, through the smokescreen of musicology, as
a superb entertainer. What we will miss, most of all, is that stupendous array
of stage tricks. You could go to P.D.Q. Bach resolutely and proudly ignorant of
Mozartian sonata form and Baroque oratorio mannerisms, and still have a
marvelous evening of funny sounds and stage shenanigans. An enlightened society
might have laws against the P.D.Q. Bach deprivation that Peter Schickele now
threatens. He and his alter ego would, in such a society, be locked up, in
adjacent padded cells.
* * * * *
“If I have one regret,” said Schickele, “it’s that I didn’t think up another
funny name for myself — Walter Krankheit, perhaps — when I started with
P.D.Q. Almost the same time as that first concert, a publisher brought out my
first serious compositions under my own name. Inevitably, my serious stuff has
been taken in some circles as the clown wanting to play Hamlet.”
There is, in fact, a considerable and attractive repertory of authentic
Schickele: a musical version of the old play “The Knight of the Burning
Pestle,” large-scale pieces that pit rock or bluegrass bands against symphony
orchestras, songs and chamber music, and the much-admired score to the sci-fi
film classic “Silent Running.” The very next night after the P.D.Q. Bach
farewell, in fact, April 2, Schickele appears as pianist, with the Armadillo
String Quartet, in a program of his chamber music at Mount St. Mary’s College
in Brentwood.
And then? Schickele ticked off a larger-than-life agenda: a radio series to be
called “Schickele Mix” (“a little bit of everything that happens to interest
me at the moment”), a television series for children, a possible movie project
on the life of P.D.Q. (Aha! There goes that sabbatical!), chamber concerts by
“Peter Schickele and Friends” on a barge under the Brooklyn Bridge.
Even if he wanted to, Hamlet isn’t going to have the time to play the clown.
Not for a while, anyhow.
SIDEBAR:
“I’m not making this up, you know!” shrieks Anna Russell in the middle of her
famous retelling of the story of Richard Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung,” at
the point where the hero Siegfried meets the first woman he has ever seen who
isn’t one of his aunts. The point, which Russell superbly establishes, is that
you don’t have to make things up to extract music’s quotient of hilarity. All
you have to do is to tell the truth — somewhat selectively, of course.
Russell, London-born and now retired, enchanted audiences for years with the
thrust and the wisdom of her musical observations. Her persona was the
lecturer, with her talks garishly illustrated from the piano. Like Schickele,
she was awesomely accurate in her parodies and pastiches: a whole Verdi opera
based on “Hamlet,” a program of mock Schubert lieder (with the deathless
observation that singers of German songs, like cheese, are only good when
they’ve properly rotten).
Russell’s records, taken from live performances and therefore sometimes
blotted out by laughter and applause, are a priceless legacy — or would be, if
they were still in the catalog. There is, however, a splendid video of a
complete Russell recital, including the Wagner.
Records of the Hoffnung Festival, once on EMI-Angel, also seem to be out of the
catalog, a situation best described as unconscionable. The late Gerald Hoffnung
was a conductor, tuba player, cartoonist and humorist who assembled several
elaborate music festivals, with contributions by major composers, to explore in
depth music’s lunatic fringe — again, with deadly accuracy.
What if, a Hoffnung piece asks, the offstage trumpet in Beethoven’s Third
“Leonore” Overture kept chiming in in the wrong place, and then missed his
proper entrance? What about the “1812” played by an ensemble of baroque
instruments? The Hoffnung treasures include the absolute last word on
Schoenbergian 12-tone music, a piece in which the climax is a measure of
silence, notated in 3/4 time, to “impart a quasi-Viennese flavor.” Wise,
accurate and hilarious, Hoffnung never had to make anything up, either.

Andrew Davis had already done well by the Los Angeles Philharmonic two months
ago, in a regularly scheduled appearance as guest conductor. This week he has
done even better, in a noble rescue operation.
This week’s concerts at the Music Center, Beethoven’s Second Symphony and the
Berlioz “Fantastic” Symphony, were slated as the program for Roger
Norrington’s debut with the orchestra. Norrington has had emergency surgery,
however, and Davis took over the same program, most handsomely. Despite less-
than-normal rehearsal time — he was engaged in England until two days before
Thursday night’s concert — he presented a superior evening of high-grade
musicianship, with support from the orchestra of like quality.
It wasn’t the evening it was going to be, of course. Norrington’s readings of
both these symphonies are known quantities from recordings: interesting,
powerful and, well, strange. Davis, instead, gave polished and spirited
versions of both works that had little in the way of iconoclastic value, but
much in the way of musical value.
The Beethoven, the composer’s high-spirited farewell to the musical methods of
a previous generation, is not nearly often enough heard for its fund of
delights. Davis managed those delights very well. If a single objection might
be advanced, it would embrace the rather spirited tempo for the slow movement
that is, after all, marked “larghetto.” This seemed to trivialize the
profound lyricism of this one movement.
The Berlioz went capitally: a raw, marvelously raucous reading of the final
movements, some lovely tenderness and mystery in what had come before. The
symphony, 160 years old, remains incredible. It is one of those works, daring
and iconoclastic when it appeared (only 3 years after Beethoven’s death but
utterly unrelated to anything in anyone else’s music) whose fund of modernity
has never faded. It stands beside the “Eroica” of Beethoven and Stravinsky’s
“Rite of Spring” as one of music’s imponderable forward steps.
This quotient of daring seemed uppermost in Daviss reading. His woodwinds
shrieked — best of all the ghostly dance from Michele Zukovsky’s clarinet in
the finale. His brass roared, his percussion thundered. The famous passage for
four tympani players at the end of the slow movement raised goosebumps on any
attentive listener. It was a good night for listening.

Arnold Schoenberg liked to complain that his name wasn’t well enough known. He
would have had a ball on Sunday afternoon, when the Schoenberg Quartet from The
Netherlands played a Schoenberg quartet at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall, with a
contingent from U.S.C.’s Schoenberg Institute also in attendance.
The group has played here before, most recently in 1989 at U.S.C. Since then,
however, a new cellist has come aboard, the dynamic Viola De Hoog, and it has
made a difference. There was none of the sense of ho-hum another concert about
their playing this time. Anything but, in fact.
The program was curious: three works written within five years: Schoenberg’s
First Quartet of 1905, Anton Webern’s Five Pieces from 1909 and the Opus 3
Quartet by Alban Berg from 1910. The choice propounded an interesting study in
middle-European romanticism in its hysterical twilight, but it may have
actually been too much of a not-quite-good thing.
Both the Berg, which runs 15 minutes and the Schoenberg, which lumbers along at
45, trace and retrace pretty much the same ground. The echoes of Wagner’s
“Tristan” have not died down, but the whole sense of tonality has begun to
come apart. A tendency to screech when a softer cry might have sufficed: that
is the frequent flaw in both works. Would either have survived in the repertory
if their creators hadn’t gone on to greater achievements? That is one of
music’s recurrent nagging questions, and it could have been asked more than
once at this concert.
The Schoenbergs specialize in this music, and they gave it the full feverish
treatment, even at the points where a drier, more reticent approach — such as
the way the late, lamented LaSalle Quartet performed on their complete
recording — might have brought out more in the music. By far the lapidary,
tiny, glittering Webern pieces fared best. For once, the performance and the
music were properly matched.
Preceding the concert was the first local showing of “Arnold Schoenberg: My
Evolution,” a 50-minute film created by UCLA’s Office of Instructional
Development to piece out visually a recording of a speech Schoenberg had given
on campus in 1949. Fascinating and valuable stuff; the world suffers in that
recording technology was invented so late in the history of the arts. A similar
recording from Mozart or Beethoven might have lightened the scholars’
load.

It should have been better. Of all the cultural events around town relating to
the County Museum’s “Degenerate Art” show, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s
concert on Thursday night (repeated tonight) turned out to be one of the more
paltry components.
Why? The programming itself was part of the problem; it seemed lazily
conceived. To be sure, the four composers represented — Ernst Krenek, Erich
Korngold, Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith — figured prominently on the Nazis’
undesirables list. But the music chosen to represent these composers, with one
exception, was only distantly related to the qualities the Nazis had found
repugnant.
Why, for example, represent Krenek with the “Symphonic Elegy” composed in
1946, long after the composer had emigrated to the U.S.? It was a far different
brand of music, exemplified by the jazz rhythms in the opera “Jonny spielt
auf” and the subversive overtones in the twelve-tone “Charles V,” that had
gotten Krenek proscribed; why hadn’t some of this been played instead? There is
beautiful music in this Elegy (composed as a memorial to Anton Webern but
actually full of motives that evoke memories of another Schoenberg disciple,
Alban Berg). It did not, however, serve its purpose.
It would be hard to discern any purpose served by the Korngold Violin Concerto
— composed in 1945 and, thus, another after-the-fact work. A patched-together
gathering of motives from several of Korngold’s vintage movie scores, the work
is lathered over with a slick and sudsy violin line. Korngold designed the work
for Jascha Heifetz but actually produced a virtual parody of that peerless
virtuoso’s more superficial mannerisms. This is as close to a totally worthless
piece as the repertory contains, not so much “degenerate” as depraved.
Hindemith’s well-known symphony built out of the opera “Mathis der Maler”
seemed a particularly lazy choice, considering the fund of unduly neglected
works by this composer — the sharp-edged, acidulous set of chamber concertos
from the 1920s, just for starters — that far more clearly epitomize what the
Nazi cultural dogma found objectionable. This would have been the perfect
occasion to bring some of this wonderful music down off the shelf, but no.
That left only Kurt Weill’s flavorsome “Threepenny Music,” jaunty
arrangements for wind band from the 1928 opera made at the request of Otto
Klemperer. But here, as with everything else on the program, the utterly
dreary, anti-rhythmic time-beating of conductor Lawrence Foster set everything
into a pall. Such lively music, such lifeless playing, and such faulty
intonation from a performing ensemble that seemed not to have been made to care
about the week’s assignment. Sidney Weiss, the Philharmonic’s concertmaster,
skated admirably across the glassy surface of the Korngold Concerto, but to
little avail.
The evening promised much, but delivered little. The tone was somehow reflected
in the “Degenerate Music” exhibition that fills two lobby levels in the hall.
It is a compelling display of valuable material about the Nazis’ marauding
music policies, but riddled with typos including, on one board, three
misspelled names in one paragraph. Management promises to correct these errors.
The concert itself, however, was beyond correction.

Ernst Krenek turned 90 last summer.He lives in Palm Springs, where he continues
to compose. His opus numbers are, in fact, well into the high 200s. At Monday
night’s Green Umbrella concert at the Japan America Theater, the sweep across
Krenek’s music ran from Opus 58, of 1928, to 234, of 1981.
Krenek has spent more than half his life as a self-willed exile from central
Europe, where the quotient of “degeneracy” in his music was recognized as
early as 1927. In that year he wrote his jazz-tinged opera “Jonny spielt
auf,” which brought down on his head epithets both racial and religious. The
logo for the current “Degenerate Music” exhibition which opens this week at
the Music Center is the Nazis’ perversion of the figure of Jonny himself from
that opera, taken from an old poster.
Monday’s concert, well-attended as all the Philharmonic’s new-music series have
been this season, offered a fascinating look into a composer who, in his many
years, has composed many kinds of music. The latest work, a set of tiny
orchestral movements called “Arc of Life” possessed, among its other charms,
an unshakable sense of nostalgia.
Krenek had never been part of Arnold Schoenberg’s circle of atonal
practitioners, yet his own career seemed to reflect the work of these
compatriots. Schoenberg, Berg and Webern had all composed sets of small
orchestral pieces, aphoristic little wisps of sound, encompassing strongly
defined sentiments in very few measures. And here was Krenek, decades later,
doing the same sort of thing in the 12 movements — none more than 90 seconds
long — of this captivating little suite.
That work came, chronologically speaking, at the near end of the survey. At the
far end was the “Little Symphony” (“little,” however, neither in length nor
scoring), bristling and sarcastic, attached this time not to the Schoenberg
ideal but to the dry-point nose-thumbing works of Kurt Weill and Paul
Hindemith. If the effect was a little like being trapped in an elevator with a
man who knows only one joke, the joke at least had its moments.
In between, in this exceptionally engrossing concert, were two vocal works, the
exquisite song-cycle “Through the Night” (in its third local performance
within the past month and still sounding like some unknown piece of Schubert,
updated but still radiant) and the dramatic monologue “The Dissembler.” This
last seemed the most dated of all, the composer’s own text (so much Freud, so
much strained comic pastiche) half-sung half-yelled by the admirable Hector
Vasquez, immersed in a musical setting that seemed more sound effect than
musical counterpart. Any composer who racks up over 200 opus numbers is
entitled to nod now and then.
Performances were top-grade throughout. David Alan Miller, who led the
Philharmonic New Music Group in three of the four items, continues to grow in
insight and technical mastery with every appearance. Donald Crockett’s
Contemporary Music Ensemble from USC did its customary fine job with “Through
the Night,” with Anne Marie Ketchum’s expert handling of the fragrant,
evocative text. The composer, too frail to attend, would have been proud.

The phenomenon of Vladimir Ashkenazy brightens our musical landscape. Pianist
and conductor, his mastery of both arts is truly remarkable. If anything, his
prowess in the one area seems to nourish the other.
He has been with us these two weeks in the latter capacity. On Wednesday he led
the Los Angeles Philharmonic through a dazzling and rewarding all-Prokofiev
program. You might think that an entire evening by this one composer might come
off stylistically limited, and with lesser talents on the podium you might be
right. But Ashkenazy, who as a pianist has delivered (and recorded) some
overpowering Prokofiev performances, demonstrated on this occasion his ability
to shine a variety of fascinating lights through the orchestral works as well.
The crown of this week’s program (repeated, by the way, tonight and Saturday)
is the Fifth Symphony, most extensive of Prokofiev’s seven and one of the
latest works by any composer to take its place in the standard repertory. The
work does explore a neo-romantic vein that, in some hands, might sound a little
old-fashioned for a work dating from as recently as 1944. But there is an
abrasive, thoroughly original side to this music as well, and this quality —
the way long melodic lines, for example, take interesting and unexpected turns
into dark areas — stood out especially well in Ashkenazy’s performance.
It was an exceptionally attractive program, and a difficult one as well. There
were passing problems in orchestral execution on Wednesday night, a few blurred
wind and brass attacks, that would probably be smoothed out in subsequent
performances. But at its best the Philharmonic honored its gifted guest
conductor with playing robust and alert.
The evening began with a relative novelty, an orchestral suite from the opera
“War and Peace,” put together in 1987 by Christopher Palmer: dazzling dance
pieces, a ravishing quiet Intermezzo and a final striding theme (the great
chorus that ends the opera) that grabs you by the throat. If you need urging to
take in the San Francisco Opera’s staging of this grand if imperfect work next
September, let it be in this selection of snippets, 20 minutes of sublime music
out of four hours.
Alexander Treger, the orchestra’s co-concertmaster, was soloist in the D-major
Violin Concerto, exquisite music, delicate and quiet, played with high regard
for these qualities. Between this work of 1915, and the “War and Peace”
excerpts from 1953, the variety of Prokofiev’s stylistic outlook was broad
indeed. It was neatly sketched in this commendable concert.THE FACTSWhat: The Los Angeles Philharmonic in an all-Prokofiev program.When: 8 p.m., tonight and Saturday.Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave in downtown Los Angeles.Behind the scenes: Vladimir Ashkenazy, conductor; Alexander Treger, violin.Tickets: $9-$40; phone: 213 480-3232.Our rating: * * * *

The world is well supplied with promising pianists, accomplished pianists, even
a few great pianists. Yet Maurizio Pollini stands apart, a musician of such
towering intelligence and originality, coupled with with a virtuoso’s technique
so close to flawless as anyone could hope from mortal fingers, that he seems to
merit his own category.
A cheering capacity crowd at the Music Center on Tuesday night roared its
agreement. The program had no startling novelties: the complete Preludes of
Chopin, Berg’s Piano Sonata, Schoenberg’s “Small Pieces,” Opus 19 and
Stravinsky’s fiendishly demanding transcription of parts of his “Petrouchka”
ballet, with Ravel and more Chopin as encores. Pollini’s playing was thoroughly
novel, however; not a moment in this extraordinary recital failed to give off
the sense that a sovereign intellect seemed to be creating each musical phrase
anew.
The effect in the Chopin was particularly arresting. Never a pianist to shrink
from taking chances, Pollini brought to these visionary miniatures a broad
spectrum of interpretive devices. Moments linger in the memory: the recitative-
like passages in the second Prelude, so softly, mysteriously played that they
seemed like voices from another planet; the thundering onrush of No. 16 and the
soft but insistent mood-painting in the so-called “Raindrop.” Miniatures
these works might be; as Pollini played them they fused into a single, most
grandiose, musical entity.
The Berg and Schoenberg works, appropriate contributions to the current
showings around town of suppressed Germanic art, were also wonderfully put
forth.There was a control of line and color here that set both pieces into a
historic continuum: romanticism’s last gasp, and the first steps into a new
musical territory where the old artistic standards no longer mattered.
The Stravinsky was there, of course, to send the crowd home happy. Such useless
music this is, contrasted to the orchestral original! Yet such exhilaration, as
Pollini seemed to turn his resonant Hamburg Steinway into an idealized
orchestra beyond even Stravinsky’s wildest dreams!
Of course, the crowd didn’t exactly go home, happy or otherwise, at that point.
As the final reward there came nothing less than the soaring, ecstatic B-flat
minor Scherzo of Chopin. Hardly a mere encore piece, the work capped an
enchanted evening. Music-making doesn’t get much better than this.

Art for the ear, art for the eye: it made for a compelling mixture at the County
Museum on Monday night. In the Bing Theater’s Monday Evening Concert series, an
imaginatively arranged program formed a musical reflection of the “Degenerate
Art” exhibition across the plaza at the Anderson Gallery. By a stroke of
generous planning, the exhibition remained open right up to concert time; the
connections between sight and sound were easily measured.
The effect, however, was not what most of the large audience surely expected.
So overpowering are the elements in the visual display — the paintings, the
film clips, the evocation of life in the arts in a time of horror — that the
concert itself, however well planned and performed, came across inevitably as
an anticlimax.
That fact, in itself, could stand as a tribute to the way Leonard Stein and his
USC colleagues planned the program. The musical elements most repugnant to the
Nazis, after all, were the quiet, sophisticated intellectuality in the works of
Arnold Schoenberg and his colleagues and disciples, the subtle, pointillistic
patterns in Anton Webern, the complexity in Ernst Krenek and in Schoenberg
himself. A program of this music, heard immediately after an immersion in the
explicit fury that leaps off the walls in the exhibition, was bound to sound
shackled.
And so it was, despite some remarkable playing and singing by USC ensembles
under Leonard Stein (in his final act of cultural glory before his retirement
as head of USC’s Arnold Schoenberg Institute), Donald Crockett and Larry
Rachleff. At the start there was Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments in a
crisp, energized reading; at the end came Schoenberg’s “Accompaniment Music
for a Film Scene,” handsomely delivered by the 40-member USC Chamber
Orchestra. You don’t find, under every cabbage leaf, student ensembles capable
of managing this kind of fearsome complexity. USC did itself proud.
In between came a scattering of vocal works: Krenek’s radiant “Durch die
Nacht” repeated from the campus performance of two weeks ago, some of
Alexander von Zemlinsky’s lavender-tinged, world-weary pieces, and rather an
excessive sampling of Hanns Eisler’s simplistic, sing-song settings of poetry
of Bertolt Brecht and Ignazio Silone.
Anne Marie Ketchum and Stephen Kimbrough were the accomplished, stylish
singers; the veteran Stein provided marvelous support as pianist and conductor.
Wise counselor and musician, a bulwark of musical life in this region for
longer than anyone cares to remember, the 74-year-old Stein had come back from
a recent heart attack to perform in a program obviously dear to his heart.