So I've Heard

PAUL: I HAVE TO GIVE A LECTURE IN THE MORNING, IN AROUND NOON. HERE’S ANOTHER COPY OF MY SUNDAY COLUMN; I DON’T SEE WHERE ANY WORDS ARE MISSING UNLESS JON DID SOME EDITING> ANYHOW, I’LL SEE YOU LATER — ALAN [F/L]Paul Hillier, much respected for his recordings of early music with his Hilliard
Ensemble, brings his forces to town on April 3 for the first American
performance of the “Berlin Mass” by the contemporary Estonian-born composer
Arvo Part. New Albion, a record label renowned for its service to hardcore
contemporary music, has just produced a disc of early 15th century music from
the Island of Cyprus. Something seems to connect certain kinds of very old and
very new music, and the connections are fascinating.
Take that collection from Cyprus as a starting point. The disc contains 16
pieces, some sacred and some secular, composed at the court of Cyprus during a
brief flowering of high culture on the island, collected in a manuscript now in
a library in Turin. The performers are the members of P. A. N. (Project Ars
Nova) based in Basel. The music is, for the most part, intricately composed,
sometimes with three or more vocal parts sung simultaneously but using
different texts and moving at different tempos.
Beyond question, hearing this music is an exotic experience. The harmonies are
both rich and austere, something like the stretched-out perspective of medieval
paintings on gold backgrounds. By the standards we are most familiar with, the
harmonic style from Bach to Mahler, the music constantly eludes our
expectation, veering wildly into unexpected regions. These regions were not, of
course, “unexpected” to their anonymous composers. If there isn’t a word for
the auditory equivalent of “hindsight,” there ought to be. Try as we might,
we cannot help but bring the full range of our previous listening — Mozart,
the Beatles, whatever — to any and every new experience that comes our way.
Inevitably, we bring some of that same process to hearing new music. There,
too, as in those 15th-century Cyprus songs (which on their own, by the way,
are marvelous, flavorsome pieces) our expectations are constantly being
tricked. As we hear this old music with our late-20th-century ears, we derive
the completely twisted picture of the composer who refuses to follow the
classic rules — even though those “rules” hadn’t yet been invented. We react
in much the same way to first hearings of music of our own time. This is not to
state, of course, that the way to hear very new music is to steep yourself in
very old, but it sometimes helps.
Some modern composers, of course, draw the past around themselves as a sort of
justification for their own innovations. Arnold Schoenberg, early in his
career, was fascinated by the revival in Germany and Austria of the music of
the great 14th-century musician/poet Guillaume de Machaut, especially in the
way Machaut often constructed music around formal devices that no listener
could ever be expected to hear.
One of Machaut’s most famous songs is titled “My End is My Beginning,” and in
the song the tenor part follows the soprano line note-for-note, but backwards.
Nobody could ever hear what Machaut is doing here, and that doesn’t matter; it
is simply a great secret stroke of structural genius and, of course, it fits
the text. Schoenberg’s later theories of twelve-tone writing, as he himself
acknowledged, drew some of their inspiration from this great idea of building a
piece of music around a sense of order strong yet inaudible.
No composer ever shakes completely free of music’s rich and glorious past.
Some, in fact, wallow in it.
The late Harry Partch, that sterling iconoclast whose dance-drama “The
Bewitched” has just reappeared on a CRI compact disc, decided early in his
career that music had started to go wrong around the Middle Ages. He spent his
life working out a system of composition, for which he designed and built his
own instruments, that would, he fondly imagined, transport our senses back to
the scales and melodies of ancient Greece. On a diametrically opposite level,
Germany’s Carl Orff, who figures as one of the enemy forces in the
“degenerate” art exhibits currently around town, served his Nazi masters by
turning music from an ancient Bavarian manuscript into latter-day marching and
drinking songs; hence, “Carmina Burana.”
The matter of Arvo Part is particularly interesting. He is, first of all, the
best-known of a small group of important names to emerge from Estonia, whence
no names had emerged before: the composer Eduard Tubin a generation back, and
the conductor Neeme Jarvi — newly appointed music director of the Detroit
Symphony who, like Part, fled his country some years ago fearing political
oppression.
Part currently lives in West Berlin. His early music includes three symphonies
(recorded by Jarvi on Sweden’s B-I-S label). They are strong, compact works,
densely contrapuntal, extroverted in their orchestral brilliance. But then, in
the mid-1970s, Part’s music took a strange turn toward a much more inward,
almost mystical style. The first record of his music to achieve fame in this
country contained a series of quiet, still pieces that seemed, in ways not
easily described, to invoke a sense of the distant musical past: the austere
harmonies, once again, of Machaut.
Then came the incredible “Passio” of 1982, 71 minutes of music so still, yet
so gripping, that it seems to move out beyond such secular matters as time. It
is, again, music of a medieval sensibility — not because it imitates the music
of the past, which it doesn’t, but because its subtle, other-worldly sounds
inspire the same feelings as you might find on entering a great Gothic
cathedral. To hear Part’s “Passio” — a setting of verses from the Passion as
told in the Book of John, for small chorus with instrumental quartet and organ
— is to journey to Cologne in front of your own stereo.
The recording of “Passio,”on the ECM label, is by Hillier and his Hilliard
Ensemble, and this is reason enough to look forward to the same group’s
performance here of the new Part work, April 3 at St. Basil’s Church in
downtown Los Angeles, part of MaryAnn Bonino’s “Historic Sites” concert
series.
Like Arvo Part, Hillier himself has made a world for himself balanced between
the very up-to-date present and the distant past. One of his most fascinating
recordings, on the ECM label, is called “Proensa,” after an ancient version
of the name Provence, that fragrant region in the south of France that nurtured
the great tradition of the Troubadours, those poetic wanderers whose aim was to
fill the world with song.
Hillier has, on this disc, sampled the surviving examples of medieval solo
song, and reconstructed a series of glosses on these songs, combining in a most
attractive way elements of past and present. Three players on ancient
instruments, such as the Troubadours themselves might use, are his backing. The
music is purely joyous. Hillier, by the way, has abandoned his London base for
a time and joined the music faculty of U.C. Davis: a welcome presence
indeed.

Cellists like to complain about the paucity of concertos for their instrument.
And yet they have the Dvorak, and few concertos for any instrument are as
rapturously beautiful as that supremely eloquent work.
Lynn Harrell was the soloist in Dvorak’s concerto this past weekend, and
Vladimir Ashkenazy conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic. If there has been a
more sublime performance of anything at the Music Center this season, it has
escaped these ears. As a solo performance, as a collaboration between soloist
and conductor, as a study in give-and-take between soloist and orchestra, this
was music-making of the highest order. On Saturday night the crowd cheered
itself hoarse at the end. Even more remarkable, however, was the audience’s
respectful, cough-free silence throughout the performance.
Harrell has played the concerto, as all cellists must, throughout his career;
he has recorded it twice. Even so, there was a new dimension to his latest
performance, a breadth in the rhetoric, a long and consistent line of thought,
that represent something of a milestone for him.
The touchstone for any performance of this work is the moment midway in the
first movement where the cello and a solo flute converse, quietly but
ecstatically. As Harrell and the orchestra’s flutist Janet Ferguson entered
into this conversation, the drab concert hall suddenly became an enchanted
place, with moonbeams everywhere.
The whole performance, in fact, seemed motivated by a sense of intimacy, of
creating chamber music on a grandiose but heartfelt level. Between the
strapping Harrell and the diminutive Ashkenazy there is considerable distance.
Where the Dvorak concerto was concerned, however these gifted musicians saw eye
to eye.
Otherwise, the evening held few charms. It may be possible, in fact, to chart
civilization’s advance by how abominable William Walton’s “Wise Virgins”
ballet music now sounds, half a century after its creation. In 1940 there
seemed little harm in the composer’s taking on a clutch of arias and choruses
from Bach cantatas and recasting them for full orchestra; now the work comes
across as a grotesque and cruel insult to the source material. Ashkenazy and
the orchestra gave it the full treatment, including a Paganini-sized vibrato in
Sidney Weiss’ violin solo in the “Sheep May Safely Graze” segment.
Then there was some original Walton, the clattery and bombastic Second Symphony
of 1960, a sad landmark in the creative decline in Walton’s late years. Had the
composer assimilated a surfeit of tinsel from his years as a movie composer? Or
was he simply written out? The Philharmonic had celebrated Walton’s music
properly a few weeks ago, with the marvelous Viola Concerto of 1929. That is
where matters should have ben left.

Monday night at the Japan-America Theater, and the latest running of the CalArts
Contemporary Music Festival came to a festive close, with the rattle and roar
of Balinese percussion blasting its way through the sounds of Western-style
woodwinds and brass. If not much else in the four-day round of concerts and
discussions added up to the sheer dazzle of this last work, “Crossovers” by
the Balinese composer I Nyoman Wenten, the least that can be said of this
extended, challenging weekend was this: even its failures were
interesting.
The paired concepts of interaction and cross-culturation, stated at the outset
of the festival last Friday, remained apparent to the end. Sunday’s concert, in
the Modular Theater on the CalArts campus, was a case in point.
It began with a joyous romp by jazz guru Charlie Haden and his Liberation Music
Orchestra, abetted in some works by Paul Vorwerk’s CalArts Chorus. Big, loud,
wonderfully extroverted but beautifully in control, the 22-piece ensemble
worked mostly around a kind of primeval jazz; spirituals and African chants
figured prominently in the texture, yet the pieces played were also
“classical” in the sense of large-scale, intricate structuring. One regret:
the music’s complexity demanded Haden’s services as a conductor, but allowed no
time for his marvelous bass-playing.
Sunday’s concert ended with more transculturation, music from the CalArts
gamelan under its regular leader K. R. T. Wasitodiningrat, with traditional
dances performed as dancing behind a shadow screen. Part of the ongoing charm
at CalArts has always been the spectacle of its obviously Californiate students
imbued with the techniques and the rhythms of the Indonesian gamelan; even a
deaf person could have picked up on the transcultural process as it worked at
this concert.
The aim at Monday’s concert, with Vorwerk leading the New CalArts 20th Century
Players, seemed to be a sort of sweep through a variety of progressive musical
ideas, demonstrating the interaction process in the relation of player to
computer (as in Jean-Claude Risset’s “Duet for One Pianist) as well as the
interaction of cultures in the Wenten piece.
Along the way there was one low bow toward one of progressive music’s
archetypes, in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Refrain” (terribly dated after a mere
30-year existence), another bow toward the instrumental experimenters (Robert
Dick’s “Eyewitness” for flute quartet) and some attractive atmosphere-
depiction (Libby Larsen’s “Black Roller”). There was also James Newton’s
“The Suffering Servant,” a setting of lines from Isaiah for singer and
ensemble.
Nothing much got proved. Bryan Pezzone’s yeoman service in the dreary Risset
work, clattering away at one piano while also activating another by computer
controi, seemed like a lot of fuss over something just as easily accomplished
with one of those “Music Minus One” records. Newton’s piece, with all the
good will in the world, still sounded like what it was, a timid effort by one
of our superb jazz musicians to hide his best talent behind bland declamation
and equally insipid instrumental support.
In the long run, the triumph of the festival was of the usual kind. A lot of
new music got heard over a brief and busy time, played with the high competence
that CalArts drills into all its young performers. Success and failure were
mingled in the classic proportion, and that’s par for the course.

[*] laby2;p1205. By Alan Rich [B] Daily News Music Writer [B]On a blessedly rainy day last week, 85 musicians gathered for a recording
session in a Culver City sound studio. If the sight was familiar enough, the
circumstances weren’t. It was, in fact, the inaugural gig of a brand-new
orchestra. It hadn’t yet given its first live concert, and wouldn’t for several
months. Its members had never even played together, for that matter, before
this session. In fact, the orchestra had only been recruited the week before.
Yet it already had a lucrative recording contract with Philips.
This, then, was the maiden flight of the brand-new Hollywood Bowl Orchestra,
whose glowing prospects had been announced at a press conference last fall,
long before a single member, aside from conductor John Mauceri, had been
booked. Forty-five years ago, Hollywood Bowl had had its own resident orchestra
and conductor, Leopold Stokowski’s Hollywood Bowl Symphony. Now with the word
“symphony” dropped for good reason, the great Los Angeles summertime concert
and picnic venue will again be served by its own titular orchestra.
The dropping of “Symphony” from the title is significant. The new orchestra
was formed, recuited from the immense local pool of freelance musicians,
specifically to serve the Bowl for the lighter-weight programming: the weekend
concerts that often come with fireworks and, therefore, draw huge crowds, and
the opening preview week that encompasses the Bowl’s 4th-of-July
celebrations.
For those listeners, and their number is legion, who might have found
intimidation in the notion of the august Los Angeles Philharmonic as the Bowl’s
one resident ensemble, the presence of this second orchestra will suggest a
kinder, gentler concertgoing experience. For the Philharmonic musicians, for
whom playing those weekend-concert pop programs might have represented a kind
of slumming, the new orchestra will send them back to their ivory towers. It
will also, promises Philharmonic general director Ernest Fleischmann, allow the
classical orchestra more time to rehearse its own Tuesday and Thursday
symphonic programs, a consummation many listeners and critics have devoutly
wished lo these many years.
And so there was the latest orchestra in town, under its new conductor, working
up its first recording, a disc to be called “Hollywood Dreams” — not, as
conductor Mauceri pointed out, merely another collection of movie tunes and
other morsels inspired by Hollywood, but a selection as well of “some of the
dreams Hollywood created.” One selection was a genuine curio: a fanfare
created by the formidable 12-tone composer Arnold Schoenberg, during his time
as a Los Angeles resident,for Stokowski’s earlier Hollywood Bowl Symphony: a
pastiche of themes from Schoenberg’s great choral work “Gurre-Lieder.”
Behind thick glass walls, but connected to the control room by microphones and
video cameras, Mauceri and the orchestra swung into a sonorous selection, some
of the music for the forthcoming Albert Brooks film (or Meryl Streep film,
depending on how you look at it) “Defending Your Life,” due out this summer.
Composer Michael Gore, who is also the producer of this disc, beamed approval
from behind an intimidating array of controls.
“This movie starts off in a waiting room of Heaven,” Mauceri called out to
the orchestra by way of cluing them in to the mood. “It’s all very sweet,
about two dead people who meet.” A question came up about the scoring in a
certain passage. “This might work for a moment in the movie,” Mauceri
reasoned with the composer, “but could we change it for the record?” The
composer acquiesced.
“I hate records of bygone movie music,” Mauceri said during a break. “But
this one will be better. The record will be out, next summer, while the movie
is still playing, and so it’ll be much more current.
New York-born and Yale-trained, the 45-year-old Mauceri has had a varied career
that stamps him as ideal for a Hollywood Bowl identification. His actual debut
as a conductor was in 1973 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; in the same year
he made his operatic debut at Washington’s Wolf Trap Festival. On Broadway, he
was on the podium for the Hal Prince reworking of Bernstein’s “Candide” and
also won a Tony for the revival of Rodgers and Hart’s “On Your Toes.”
The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra is the first, however, that Mauceri can call his
own. “”It’s been a long time coming,” he said, his dimples practically
incandescent.
“Conductors don’t have an easy time of it,” he went on. “A violinist can
carry his instrument around; a pianist can always rent one. When I was at Yale,
and desperately needed an orchestra to conduct, I used to cruise the streets,
looking for whoever I could find who was carrying an instrument case. I would
waylay that person; it didn’t matter how good or bad. And now, 25 years later,
all that importuning has paid off.
In Los Angeles, of course, there are more musicians walking the streets
carrying instrument cases. The movie studios and broadcast stations don’t
maintain the house orchestras that they once did, but even with this decline
this remains one of the two American cities where a freelance musician can
carve out a decent living — all other things being equal, of course. (New York
is the other.)
A freelance musician in Los Angeles earns his real money in the studios, doing
the music for commercials and TV dramas, or in a movie orchestra for a big John
Williams epic. If all this commercial work undermines his faith in artistic
standards, he can play in one of the regional symphony orchestras: the
Pasadena, Long Beach or Glendale, or the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.
The new Hollywood Bowl orchestra fits into that latter category. In its first
season, which begins with the Bowl this summer, the orchestra will play six
pairs of concerts under its own name; most of its members will play another
pair under the name “Members of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.” Then in
December there will be a tour, two weeks in Japan with a concert scheduled for
Tokyo on New Year’s Eve. And then there’s the Philips contract, which sets the
orchestra above the other regional groups that usually don’t get to
record.
“All that means about $20,000 this first year, which isn’t bad for this amount
of work,” said oboist Joel Timm. “I came out to Los Angeles five years ago. I
had done fairly well in New York, including a year as a temporary player in the
New York Philharmonic. What lured me out here, aside from the obvious pleasures
of life in a warm climate, was an offer to teach half-time at U.S.C.’s music
school. That seemed like a job with high visibility in the music community, and
that translates directly into good freelance jobs.”
Even with that kind of experience and visibility, a freelancer newly arrived in
Los Angeles, or in New York or San Francisco or Chicago, or anyplace with some
amount of freelance activity and high amounts of competition, doesn’t
immediately walk into top-ranking jobs. “I paid my dues,” Timm remembered.
“No matter how good you are, and how nice a guy, the working people in this
town aren’t just going to move over and let you into the group. You start in by
working for what you can get, in smaller gigs or as a substitute. It’s only
now, after six years, that I can feel safe in the inner circle — or close to
it, anyhow.
“And that’s because I’m an oboist, and there aren’t too many of us. If I were
a violinist I might be still be struggling on the edges.”
Another time-out, and freelance keyboard artist and pianist Ralph Grierson
showed off his own fantasic music machine: an array of keyboards (10 or 11 in
all) hooked up to another array of faucets and knobs, all of it hung on three
racks that encompass a space about the size of an old-fashioned phone booth.
Grierson was joking about all that synthesizing equipment someday taking over
from live musicians, something he doesn’t believe for one minute. His jokes
were not finding their mark with the live musician next to him, harpist Katie
Kirkpatrick.
“Los Angeles is a wonderful place,” Grierson said, “with this incredible
aggregation of freelance musicians who can do anything and everything, with no
need for help from electronics and synthesizers. But there’s all this fear of
electronics taking over, which they won’t. If you could translate that fear
energy into practice energy, think how much better, even, we’d all
sound.”
And the fact that someone, namely the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has in these
fear-racked days gone out and started a brand-new orchestra should be, you’d
think, assurance enough that live performance is here to stay.

Once again we owe much to the venerable conductor, Kurt Sanderling. Whether or
not his efforts with the vast, lumbering Eighth Symphony of Dimitri
Shostakovich were actually worth his time with the Los Angeles Philharmonic
this past weekend, he certainly put the work forward in the best possible
light.
The symphony dates from 1943 and needs to be heard, therefore, in the light of
its composer’s moods in his war-torn country. Like the other “War” symphony,
the Seventh, it begins with vast statements: in this case a deep, sombre
opening slow movement that explodes into abrasive madness near the end and
takes up nearly half of the symphony’s hourlong span. Comparisons to some of
Gustav Mahler’s more psychotic outpourings are inevitable.
Then, like Mahler, Shostakovich does a certain amount of thrashing to devise
ensuing movements large enough to balance his opening statement. Like Mahler
(in the Fifth Symphony, for example) he is not completely successful. The two
brief scherzos, in Shostakovich’s well-known jokey style, sound trivial. They
lead to a slow movement that meanders down dark corridors before finally coming
to rest in gleaming C-major sunshine.
That one moment is the symphony’s highpoint, but it is a single moment out of a
very long run. A finale, built out of forgettable melodic blocks, ends softly
and serenely (an effect ruined on Friday afternoon by heavy conversation in
seats L-27 and 28). That moment, too, is potentially beautiful.
Sanderling’s way with Shostakovich is familiar from his previous visits here.
Having known the composer, he also seems gifted with powerful insights into the
rhetorical side of this music. He drew a tremendous, virtuosic performance out
of the orchestra, full of pianissimos that you didn’t so much hear as feel as
goosebumps, and overpowering outbursts that were never raucous or cheap. If
there is a case to be made for this imperfect work, a matter open to argument,
let it be on Sanderling’s level of eloquence.
Elizo Virzaladze, the darkly handsome pianist from Soviet Georgia who had
played Mozart with Sanderling on a previous visit, did so again, starting the
program with the B-flat Concerto (K. 450). One of the less-frequently performed
of Mozart’s mature concertos, it operates on a quiet, witty, warm-hearted
level. Sanderling in his wisdom had reduced the size of the string contingent,
so that the lovely wind scoring came through nicely.
Even so, it was not a successful performance. A term like “deadpan” is never
pleasant to encounter in discussing Mozart performances, but no other
description fits Virzaladze’s unloving, uninflected onslaught on Mozart’s
magical measures. The program biography states that she “reads Shakespeare and
Goethe in their original languages.” Too bad she did not accord Mozart that
same favor.

Half a century ago, Los Angeles teemed with Germanic art, as refugees from Adolf
Hitler’s persecution moved their creativity westward. Now, with the
“Degenerate Art” show at the County Museum currently drawing crowds and a
corollary “Degenerate Music” show about to open at the Music Center, that
episode in Los Angeles’ cultural history takes on a whole new perspective.
The community at large is contributing handsomely to the observance of these
strange and disturbing pages from history. This week, for example, there have
been concerts at both U.S.C. and the County Museum, specifically devoted to
examples of what Hitler’s minions had earmarked as “degenerate,” and the
results have been illuminating and rewarding.
On Tuesday night a too-small audience at U.S.C.’s Hancock Hall heard a program
by the school’s own Contemporary Music Ensemble under Donald Crockett, with
music fromn the 1930s by Anton Webern and Ernst Krenek that had certainly
aroused Nazi anger, and a brilliant new piece that attests to Germany’s musical
rebirth. On Wednesday, the superb New York-based American String Quartet played
a mostly thrilling program of music by four proscribed composers: Webern again,
Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith and Viktor Ullman, this time before a
properly large and responsive audience at the County Museum.What did all this music have in common, such as to arouse the ire of the German
censors? Seriousness and intricacy, for one thing. The complex unravelings in
Schoenberg’s Third Quartet of 1927 no longer intimidate listeners; the gorgeous
long melodic lines in the slow movement of Hindemith’s Opus 22 Quartet of 1922
pose no problems; the visionary nature painting in Ernst Krenek’s 1931 song-
cycle “Durch die Nacht” positively glow in the warm lighting of late
romanticism.But there was a time when this was the newest new music of its day, and a lazy
cultural consumership might find reasons, or invent reasons masked in some
high-flown propaganda about race and nation, for shoving all this aside. Among
the many things that these exhibits in town, and the accompanying musical
events, prove, it is the damage the arts can suffer when those in charge cannot
begin to comprehend the artistic material at hand. That message, unfortunately,
is timeless.On the U.S.C. program, planned by the Schoenberg Institute’s Leonard Stein,
there was also a new commissioned work, Berthold Tuercke’s Octet for winds,
brass and strings: strong, abrasive music touched here and there by the ghost
of Webern, but speaking throughout with its own voice as well. Thirty-three
years old and currently teaching in Berlin, Tuercke is a find. The Kronos
Quartet, among others, has taken up some of his music.Viktor Ullman’s short Third Quartet, eloquently played by the Americans, owes
its fame to its historic circumstance: composed in 1943 while its composer, a
former Schoenberg pupil, was in the notorious Terezin concentration camp in
Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. For all this, however, it remains stillborn,
note-spinning at romanticism’s death-throes, competent and correct. Its value
as a document is beyond question; its value as music is beyond redemption.

If these Green Umbrella concerts keep getting better, they’re in danger, one of
these Monday nights, of taking off into orbit. Once again, Monday night at the
Japan-America Theater, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new-music series struck
gold: a triumph both of programming and performance.
Oliver Knussen conducted with great skill and inmsight, his second appearance
this season. The only thing wrong about that is the unseemly modesty that keeps
him from programming any of his own excellent music. On his home turf, this
burly Britisher is highly regarded as a composer, and also as a brilliant
interpreter of other people’s new scores. Lucky Los Angeles, that he has chosen
this as his major American base.
Four works — two American and two British — constituted the program, with the
best music placed at beginning and end. Morton Feldman’s “For Frank O’Hara,”
which began proceedings, is one of that late composer’s characteristic
exercises in sounds mostly at the edge of silence. Written for seven
instruments — flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and two percussionists —
and relatively brief (15 minutes or thereabouts) as Feldman pieces go, the
music generates a spell both firm and gentle. A plink here, a plunk there, a
silence in between: the sense of unfolding is inexorable.
The final work was more lavish by far: Harrison Birtwistle’s {cq} “Meridian,”
composed in 1971 but only now produced on the West Coast. Birtwistle, in his
late 50s, is Britain’s most enigmatic composer, and one of its finest. Inward,
intense, not easily approached yet thoroughly gripping, his big works have yet
to make headway in this country. “Meridian,” for solo mezzo-soprano, six
female voices in ensemble, and an ensemble of winds, harps and percussion with
solo cello and French horn, exerts its power and lingers in the memory.
The texts are fragments of love poetry by Thomas Wyatt (of the 16th century)
and Christopher Logue (of our own); they are blended into the instrumental
ensemble until the end product becomes a synthesis of spoken and unspoken
drama. As Mary King sang the solos, marvelously enveloped by the ensemble under
Knussen, the stage seemed to glow with radiant imagery.
These were the evening’s highlights. Neither the pretensions of Judith Weir’s
“The Consolations of Scholarship” nor the exuberant but not fully realized
ambitions of Brian Kehlenbach’s “In the Land Beyond Beyond,” came close.
Weir is best known for her “A Night at the Chinese Opera,” greeted with
deserved hostility at the Santa Fe Opera two seasons ago. “Scholarship” is,
blessedly, shorter but no better; again the matter at hand is a setting of
Chinese texts in a self-consciously simplistic manner of little import — this
despite a clever staging worked out for herself by singer Mary King. There was
more promise in the work of Kehlenbach, currently a composition doctoral
candidate at U.S.C. The composer mingles jazz harmonies skillfully into his
ensemble; still his piece is somewhat shapeless, long for its length. As
student music goes, Kehlenbach has made an impressive beginning. We will hear
from him again.

Just when you thought it was unsafe to return to the Music Center Opera, along comes “Elektra,” and matters are again on the mend. The company’s new production of Richard Strauss’ one-act mix of shock and shlock, unveiled Saturday night for the first of four performance, might have its flaws, but they rank as virtues compared to some of last fall’s shenanigans. Note well, for starters, that director David Pountney has hit upon the noteworthy scheme, apparently rare these days, of setting his production in the time and place — post-Trojan War Greece — specified by Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto: no updating to Fresno in the 1980s. John Bury’s set takes a few liberties; the ruined statue of Agamemnon in the foreground sports a rather modernistic war helmet. But the designs are otherwise mostly abstract, and the great palace facade, with its menacing flight of stairs slashed across the front, looks appropriately timeless. More remarkably, this set serves the opera’s title character, the crazed and murderous Elektra, as a wonderful jungle gym. Marilyn Zschau, in the mounting frenzy that is the opera’s dramatic thread, is all over the place, dashing up and down the staircase, acting out her final dance of ecstasy while swinging from some conveniently placed ropes, expiring at the end cuddled into the dismembered hand of that statue of her murdered father. All this would be fun enough to watch, but Zschau goes one further. Anyone who remembers her fabulous Renata in the company’s Fiery Angel” some years back knows that when it comes to giving voice to unbridled hysteria, nobody else in opera can touch her. And so it was again. There was nothing much to ravish the ear in Zschau’s Elektra; it’s a hard voice, with a jagged cutting edge. As such, it is a tremendous vehicle for Strauss’ steamy protagonist. This is an Elektra as the role was conceived. Then there is that Chrysothemis of Ealynn Voss, that towering talent (in any sense of the term), simply stupendous in her company debut, remarkable in the sound of her voice and, even more surprising, in the naturalness and grace of her acting. Helga Dernesch is an uncommonly interesting Klytemnestra, not the grotesque monster the character is often made out to be, but a woman in believable human torment. Rodney Gilfry’s leather-boy Orest, in a silly red hairdo, and Gary Bachlund’s Aegisthus round out the cast acceptably. Lawrence Foster conducted, veteran of many Music Center productions, star of none. He made his way tidily through the tangles of Strauss’ murderous orchestration, to be sure, but added little in the way of eloquence. Love this music or loathe it — and there are potent arguments on both sides — there are moments in the score that light up the sky, or should in a properly motivated performance. This Elektra” was pure Lawrence Foster, competent and correct, its glow steady but dim.

Enduring a performance of Edward Elgar’s Second Symphony should be no problem.
Bring along a good book and a soft pillow, and you’ve got it made.
Most of the audience at Thursday night’s Los Angeles Philharmonic concert at
the Music Center, however, had overlooked these amenities. Getting through the
Elgar Second under those deprived circumstances, then, meant spending some 55
minutes fighting off not sleep but insomnia. Sure, Andre Previn demonstrated
his expected skill in shaping the performance, but this hardly represents a
triumph of musicianship — merely of patience.
Elgar’s symphonic language presents no problems. It is the basic overripe style
brought to its culmination on the Continent by Richard Strauss, and blown up by
Elgar to such proportions as to make Strauss into a miniaturist. The musical
sequences mount, in a manner familiar nowadays from music that accompanies
movie or TV characters hurtling down dim corridors toward closed doors. The
orchestration has a kind of rolling, gummy majesty, but the lines of thought —
assuming that there are such — are difficult to tell apart in the sonorous
muck.
And yet the music remains admired in some circles, most of all in its native
England. A critic quoted in the Philharmonic program notes claims that this
music “still means much in the consciousness of the nation.” That stirs up a
real problem: how can a nation with this joyless, long-winded stuff in its
consciousness also produce “Fawlty Towers” and the Goons? There is obviously
more variety in this British consciousness than meets the ear.
Previn did, in truth, get quite a lot of brave and mellow noise out of the
orchestra, but that’s not really saying very much. Credit Elgar at least with
mastery over a tamper-proof orchestral style; it’s hard not to make the right
kind of noise here.
Far more convincing as a measure of Previn’s musical worth was the opening
work on the program, Mozart’s wondrous Clarinet Concerto, with the orchestra’s
own Michele Zukovsky as soloist. Zukovsky and Previn had, by the way, worked up
the performance on short notice, replacing the indisposed pianist Maria Joao {cq}
Pires who was scheduled for another Mozart work.
Like Previn’s Mozart performances two weeks ago, this was a triumph of serene
musicianship and a superior sense of the give-and-take that is at the heart of
Mozart’s concertos. Zukovsky, herself slender and reedy like her instrument,
bends and sways as she plays. Her clarinet cannot mimic such motions, yet its
music, as Zukovsky played it on Thursday night, had a similar beguiling
flexibility. The work itself, the last of all Mozart’s concertos, shines its
modest smile through the twilight; it is the work of a composer who, at
only
35, had already mastered the insights of a full life. The slow movement,
properly played, reaches toward the stars. It did just that the other
night.

Here we are, a growing community of operatic connoisseurs, but starved this
season for a touch from the warming hand of Giuseppe Verdi. No wonder the
prospect of Opera Pacific’s “Un ballo in maschera” {cq upper & lower case}
looked so enticing. No such luck.
“Ballo” can be reckoned Verdi’s perfect opera: beautifully proportioned,
concise, elegantly balanced between frivolity and high tragedy. Just the
opera’s second act could stand as the ideal demonstration of the dramatic
power of romantic operatic writing, from Amelia’s first fear-racked aria to the
vicious sarcasm of the final ensemble.
But even perfection of design demands a shaping hand, and the element most awry
in this generally dispiriting evening was the flabby conducting of Louis
Salemno. The opera seemed to move along as so many small and unrelated
outbursts, with little regard for anything resembling dramatic continuity —
this in the most dramatically continuous of all Verdi’s operas. Salemno
obviously admires the look of his own conducting; he was stationed high above
the orchestra so that he became an added visual presence in front of the stage
action. Unfortunately, like most of his contribution to the performance, this
was just another needless distraction.
Leona Mitchell was the Amelia, a good role for her somewhat dusky, nicely
controlled voice; she sang a performance that, under better conditions, might
have had some shape. This time it did not; like the conducting, it seemed a
performance fashioned out of small moments loosely connected. There were
moments — the start of the big Act Three aria for one — when there was hope
for a typically moving Leona Mitchell performance. But her best intentions
seemed constantly to dwindle.
At that Mitchell owned a great deal of the performance. Certainly the wobbly
Gustavo of Taro Ichihara, the lurch-‘n’-clutch of his rudimentary stage
presence, can’t have been much incentive to draw anyone into a realization of
Verdi’s high purpose. Nor Rosemary Bollin’s squeaky Oscar, a perversion of one
of Verdi’s most fascinating roles. Nor the unfocussed Ulrica of Cynthia Munzer.
Nor the Broadway-motel decor of the usually trustworthy Zack Brown. Nor…
Better than any of this was the Renato of Timothy Noble, despite the
announcement early on that he was suffering from a throat inflammation. Here
was singing in the grand Verdian manner, supported by a continually interesting
stage presence. Perhaps Noble should have shared his affliction with the rest
of the cast. At least he shared some sublime Verdi with the rest of us.
THE FACTS:
What: Opera Pacific presents Giuseppe Verdi’s “Un ballo in maschera.”
Where: Segerstrom Hall, Orange County Performing Arts Center, Costa Mesa.
When: 8 p.m., February 22, 28 and March 2; 2 p.m., February 24.
Behind the scenes: production from the Washington Opera, staged by Anne Ewers,
conducted by Louis Salemno, with sets and costumes by Zack Brown.
Starring: Leona Mitchell and Taro Ichihara (February 24 & 28); Priscilla
Baskerville and Tonio DiPaolo (February 22 and March 2).
Tickets: $20 to $70; information and reservations: 714 740-2000 or 213 480-
3232.