So I've Heard

Back in September 1964, Jascha Heifetz, the formidable fiddler, was attempting an ill-advised comeback recital at Carnegie Hall. The crowd out front was enormous, and it naturally included many people with long faces hoping for a turned-back ticket to this sold-out event. I was covering it as a music critic for the New York Herald Tribune of lamented memory. At that time, there was a violinist, 20 or so, nice Jewish boy, reasonably talented, who played in a regular spot in front of Carnegie on most concert nights, with his violin case open to receive coins. I had the idea that this guy would make a pretty good story for my paper, and what better time than after I had taken him to this night of nights? I proffered him my extra ticket; he looked at me the way Little Orphan Annie must have first looked at Daddy Warbucks.

Come concert time, the seat next to me was fully occupied, not by my grateful minstrel but by a corpulent heavy-breather who had bought my extra ticket, at a fairly inflated price, from the street fiddler. When I came out at intermission, that guy was still sawing away at his sidewalk station. I’ve never trusted one of those street players since.

Until, that is, Mr. Nathaniel Ayers began to restore my faith, with help from Steve Lopez. The slice-of-life columnist for the Los Angeles Times comes into the picture where I might have, if that klutz in New York hadn’t sold my ticket. Lopez’s splendid new book, fashioned from his columns, is called The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music. Lopez discovers Ayers first, a lone fiddler playing astonishingly well, on a downtown street corner. They meet, some bullshit is exchanged for better or worse, they part, they meet again. “…[Nathaniel] plays for a while, we talk for a while, an experience that’s like dropping in on a dream,” writes Lopez.

Nathaniel takes nonsensical flights, doing figure eights through unrelated topics. God, the Cleveland Browns, the mysteries of air travel and the glory of Beethoven. He keeps coming back to music. His life’s purpose, it seems, is to arrange the notes that lie scattered in his head …

“Your violin has only two strings,” I say. “You’re missing the other two.”

“Yes,” he says, he’s well aware. “All I want to do is play music …”

The encounter becomes a column, and then a series. A used-instrument dealer named Al Rich (not this one) donates intact instruments; so do others. Lopez digs deeper: Yes, a Nathaniel Ayers attended Juilliard some years back, showed great promise, dropped out, dropped off the planet. Former teachers remember him with passion; long to contact him. There’s a sister, a father still working in Vegas. Meanwhile the present-day Ayers becomes, for our dedicated journalist, something of a career, something of a handful.

Lopez turns impresario, virtuoso. With help from the Philharmonic’s press department, he invites Ayers to a rehearsal: Beethoven’s “Eroica” no less. Ayers sneaks his own instrument onto the emptied stage and plays some notes, hence qualifying as “soloist.” Against considerable and vociferous opposition, the middle-aged, cantankerous Ayers is force-fed into the city’s welfare system. A room is procured at one or another downtown Skid Row settlements; just as often, Ayers would prefer to plop his pillow in the Second Street Tunnel, usually out of the perfectly understandable need to stand watch over his possessions.

“The flapping of pigeon wings,” he explains, “comes down to me as applause.”

Obsessions battle: Ayers’, with maintaining his toehold in a Cloud Cuckoo Land where Beethoven calls the shots from above all rooftops; Lopez’s, to guide this tragically terminated, halfway-educated mooncalf back into loving, professorial arms and, perhaps, get him a decent job with a symphony orchestra or some such, thereby possibly harnessing his soaring spirit forever. You might ask yourself whether the world has to be so small that a reasonably amiable schizophrenic can’t sleep in a traffic tunnel and play on a two-stringed violin now and then.

The Soloist is a sweet and moving story, and there are some authentic tearjerks along the way: Ayers’ old cello prof in Cleveland first getting word that his favorite pupil is alive; Ayers and his sister reunited after all those years. (There is also a film on the way from DreamWorks, and don’t say you’re surprised! Jamie Foxx is Nathaniel Ayers, Robert Downey Jr. is Steve Lopez, and Esa-Pekka Salonen plays guess-who.) I would, however, raise an eyebrow, draw a line, or whatever the current expression has it, concerning the subtitle. Believe me, there is no “redemptive power” in music, I am most happy to report after some 60 years. It’ll knock you out, drag you down; it has sandpapered some of Nathaniel’s more interesting edges, as Lopez carefully points out on almost every page. Thank God, it hasn’t redeemed him.

THE SOLOIST: A LOST DREAM, AN UNLIKELY FRIENDSHIP, AND THE REDEMPTIVE POWER OF MUSIC | BY STEVE LOPEZ | G.P. Putnam’s Sons | 273 pages | $26 hardcover

The Last Romantic

Helmut Lachenmann cuts a solitary figure in today’s musical world. At a time when much of the talk centers on accessibility, on a generation of composer-heroes – Adams, Adès, Reich, Saariaho, Salonen, just for starters – who have found ways to reach out to audiences with serious and imaginative creativity, that old notion of the composer on his private Olympus, proudly and defiantly cloaked in his mantle of inscrutability, rests almost solely with this tall, gaunt yet smiling German gent whose music ground its way through Zipper Concert Hall last Monday. This was the last, and most off-the-wall, of this season’s Monday Evening Concerts, the venerable series rescued and restored to its historic position as one of music’s most adventurous programming enterprises anywhere in the land.

Monday evening’s program began with Lachenmann himself, at the piano in a suite of Ein Kinderspiel (Child’s Play), nicely set with keys of the upper and lower octaves silently depressed so as to enhance the piano’s resonance. Okay so far? Came then Movement (Before Paralysis), sizable music for 18 players, screeching out in all directions with jagged, dark, mysterious and inchoate patterns that defied connections (or welcomed disconnections?). This, we are told, is Lachenmann’s delight. “He is the world’s greatest composer,” proclaim a few holdouts in the new-music community who dote on inscrutability. At them in response, I fling my favorite James Thurber line: “nbsp;lsquo;He’s God!’ screamed a Plymouth Rock hen.”

Yet the concert drew a large crowd, and there were many who stood and cheered at the end. I would love to know what they heard. Prior to this concert, I knew Lachenmann mostly from the ECM recording of his setting – “opera” in the broadest sense – of the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Little Match Girl,” onto which he has hung the whole paraphernalia of his “fractured aesthetic” (Alex Ross’ term), culminating in a horrendous musical mishmash in which the ghosts of every composer in Lachenmann’s own scrapbook, Mahler, Berg, Stockhausen, Boulez, pass by simultaneously as if in some horrendous wet dream. Does that lovely, sad Andersen story deserve that? Do we? Did we on Monday?

I had never before endured pain at a Monday Evening Concert; this time I did: pain and anger. A splendid young group, the Argento Chamber Ensemble, under Michel Galante, traveled with Lachenmann to perform the Movement; another, consisting of three members of Ensemble Recherche, played his Allegro Sostenuto (more of the same) after intermission. “Played,” by the way, often consisted of blowing through only the mouthpiece of a wind instrument, banging on the case of a piano, delivering frenzied blasts through a brass instrument and otherwise violating the customary sound possibilities of various instruments. Such procedures are not new, and they have a certain joke value the first time around. The Lachenmann works were long enough to allow these things to happen several times, and you all know what happens to a joke when you tell it more than once.

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Beethoven, Bloomberg, Blog

Some of the happiest moments in a critic’s life come with discovering music you should have known long ago but didn’t. At Midori’s recital in Disney Hall, a week ago Sunday, there was a Beethoven Violin Sonata – A major, Opus 30 No. 1 – that I swear I had never heard before, or at least never paid attention. It had an ordinary, perky first movement. Then came an adagio straight out of heaven: a melting, embracing slow theme and a middle section that stood on a threshold and welcomed me with one arm and Franz Schubert with the other. Oh my, Midori plays wonderfully these days; so does Robert McDonald, her excellent collaborating pianist. A couple of weeks before, I had heard her in an unpublicized USC concert, before a paltry audience, performing a big, dramatic Penderecki sonata from 1999, very long and very intense; that work deserves to be brought out in a public performance now that she is located in Los Angeles and draws big crowds – as she did last week. I had gone to her Disney Hall concert out of curiosity for John Corigliano’s Sonata, but that turned out to be an early work, highfalutin Americana, not worth the carfare. It was Beethoven who made the evening.

Beethoven was my first love – the “Pastoral” Symphony, or what remained of it in Walt Disney’s Fantasia butchery. The Eighth Symphony figured in my first published review: Boston Herald, Thanksgiving Day, 1944, a Boston Symphony Youth Concert – and on that day, I abandoned my premed ambitions forthwith, breaking my mother’s heart, for a couple of years anyhow. (It was repaired when I introduced her to Leonard Bernstein.) Sue Cummings hired me as music critic for the Weekly in March 1992, and I got a nice note from her this week on the occasion of this, my final column. It was Cummings who thought up the title “A Lot of Night Music.” I wanted “A Little Night Music” in honor of two favorite composers (guess!), but I had no idea I’d be writing such a lot. Sixteen years! with the most cooperative local management and – honest! – the best readership any serious music critic could ever ask for. My lord! the outburst over my termination has been as gratifying as 10 Marriage of Figaro performances over a single weekend.

From this week, I’ll be writing regularly for bloomberg.com. My own blog, soiveheard.com, will be starting up any day now; there’ll be announcements on KUSC and elsewhere. I’ll also be keeping one foot in the door here at the Weekly; in fact, I’ve already got an assignment.

So, you see, it’s not so bad.

Before There Was Ambien

The air was full of memories at the season finale of the “Piano Spheres” concerts last week; the music was too. Ursula Oppens was the pianist – “Oyssla,” as Morty Feldman always called her in his high Brooklynese – and everything on her program was also by one or another of her (or our) old friends: Charlie Wuorinen, who loved to shake things up in New York academe; Bill Bolcom, ragtimer one time and tragedian the next time around; and, to cap it all, the quizzical-empirical Elliott Carter. Ursula was one of the four genius pianists who had prevailed upon Carter to create what has to be the most challenging piece of keyboard music of the past century – perhaps of all centuries. Twenty-eight years later, Carter’s Night Fantasies remains fascinatingly inexplicable; four magnificent performances by the commissioning artists (Oppens, Charles Rosen, Gil Kalish and the late Paul Jacobs) have scaled its crags, and so have others. Each attempt fulfills its 25 or so minutes of tremendously full, eager, important piano figuration differently; each fulfills the composer’s visions of “fleeting thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind during a period of wakefulness at night”; each leaves one with another shading of the sense that thinking of the deepest, most sublime order has taken place.

Why ask for more? This is the one music by Carter that most moves me with the sense of a noble, creative mind at work. If some of his other music doesn’t do this – let me leave it at this, then. Ursula filled the Zipper Auditorium the other night with astonishing unwindings. Afterward, there was another Carter, more easily likable, Caténaires (Chains), pure trickery, a fast one-line piece with no chords, just a chain of notes, amusing and delightful. The shock of being amused by Carter was enough, I guess; I preferred the astonishment, this time, of the longer work. Garrulous Wuorinen, ponderous Bolcom and a couple of Joan Tower trivialities – nothing else remains from this remarkable concert that so challenges the memory of this one sovereign work.

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Light and Dark Fantastic

There was music by Beethoven a night later, handsomely dispatched by András Schiff in the second grouping of his ongoing encounter with the “32”: a cluster of “early-middle” sonatas – Opp. 26, 27, 28 – from the time of the first couple of symphonies. The three sonatas of Opus 26 and 27 are all “irregular” in structure: the first with its Funeral March serving as the slow movement (a what-if sketch for the “Eroica”), the Opus 27 pair with their “Quasi una Fantasia” notation. If anything, the Opus 27 No. 1 is strangest of the group, with its opening movement, which keeps breaking off. Clearly, Beethoven was having some kind of high time playing with sonata structures, in no hurry to come to grips with the tread of history. There’s a splendid, if apocryphal, scene in the old Abel Gance Beethoven movie: Jilted one more time, the composer (the great Harry Baur) sneaks into the organ loft while his sweetie is being married to someone else, and hammers out the Funeral March from Opus 26.

There is something deliciously wayward about Beethoven’s state of mind at this time in his life. These “Fantasia” sonatas, even including the much-overprized “Moonlight,” have about them the sense of a carefree young experimenter in a lab. The specter of deafness hasn’t yet taken hold; the E-flat “Fantasia” Sonata, the sonata paired with the “Moonlight,” is a wild and wonderful work, musically all over the place, as though Beethoven had spilled all its pieces and is in no hurry to reassemble them. The closing theme is like one continuous chuckle.

For no reason I can easily pinpoint, I found these performances – the charm of the “Fantasia” works and, above all, the relaxation of the “Pastoral” Opus 28 – the most satisfactory of Schiff’s performances so far. Listening to early Beethoven sonatas in concentrated doses demands a certain amount of bucolic exercise, and it has, I admit, taken a while to bring this valuable series into focus.

“On the Edge of Santa Monica” and just plain on the edge: If ever a musical event fit that description, last weekend’s “Jacaranda” get-together surely did. Iannis Xenakis’ Nomos Alpha began it: Tim Loo’s solo cello howling helplessly into dark corners, beyond definition or resolution, music so beyond human management that a second solo cello must needs be called upon to untangle its principal in its final few measures. It was no disgrace for Loo to enlist Erika Duke in this manner; the madness lay in the overly great expectations by Xenakis himself in projecting such intense but unperformable music. The intensity of the music would have justified the participation of a half-dozen cellists, if necessary. Not much of Xenakis’ music invokes the sense of magic; this did. So, of course, did the evening’s final work, Stimmung, of which I have written often and with delight. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “hippie campfire” (love that!) for voices intoning magic names ended the evening even more mysteriously, gloriously, on a heavenly set capped with a Sirius mockup and six singers robed in angelic white. You had to have been there.

Obiter dictum: “Night Music” goes dark next week after 16 years. I will write about the last of this year’s Monday Evening Concerts, which I helped to save a couple of years ago as part of my job. The decision to close down my column was not mine. The notes of protest have, of course, been wonderful; they come because we all realize that music – all music but especially the endangered kind – needs people to speak for it, certainly more than one voice per community. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to write about music – periodically for the Weekly, and regularly in a blog (www.soiveheard.com) that friends are setting up, for KUSC (which was on the phone first thing), wherever. My first print was in 1944; I’m not gonna stop now.

Don’t Feed the Animals

More of the same: The new guy has come and gone after his two-week Philharmonic guest shot, leaving behind echoes of adoration and tumults of anticipation – next Disney gig: November 24 – and memories of a sound spectrum ranging from the infinitesimal (the tail flicks of Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun) to the cataclysmic amorosities of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé. It was a program of sheer ecstasy on many levels, and, on one at least, beyond any challenge: the sheer delight in the phenomenon of a master music director, at the head of a supremely responsive orchestra, with a program of music specifically designed to bring out the best in that orchestra, playing for a hot-ticket audience at the edge of its collective seat, ready and willing to swallow it whole. You have to remember Esa-Pekka Salonen’s comment, on first seeing Gustavo Dudamel in action: “He’s a conducting animal.” There have been times these past two weeks when young Dudamel has turned us all into listening animals.

And so, they – we – got what they came for. And yet … for myself, I would have been happy with a lot less than the complete Ravel ballet, of which the first half-hour is taken up in mime and gesture and musical noodling, pretty to be sure, before the music coalesces in the great climactic dances known as the Suites 1 2. The sounds are lovely, ethereal, full of everything we admire in Ravel; I can’t help thinking that the time might have been put to better use, that there might have been the chance then for further acquaintance with our new guy: A Mozart symphony, perhaps? (He has conducted nothing less than Don Giovanni, at La Scala.)

Well, he leaves us now not exactly a stranger. His command of the balances, the lights and shades, in the Romantic orchestra is phenomenal; last week’s Berlioz and this week’s Ravel, with the lovely control of wordless chorus (the Pacific Chorale) against orchestra, demonstrate an amazing – what they call, simply, an “ear.” That showed too in his sympathetic work with soloists, especially in Leila Josefowicz’s supple, dazzling dispatch of Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto this past weekend. These were great concerts on their own, and greater in their promise.

nbsp;The D-minor Demon

There’s a D-minor Concerto for Strings by Vivaldi that has haunted me since boyhood. Serge Koussevitzky used to play it often in a ponderous, dense style with the full Boston Symphony string section; oh my, how those double basses would resonate in Symphony Hall! Then there was a single-disc recording led by Alexander Schneider, with, of all things, a harpsichord on, if I remember, a Mercury disc; that was the start of awareness, for a whole generation of collectors, that there was such a thing as authentic Baroque musical performance, or something like it. That concerto – No. 11 in the “L’Estro Armonico” collection – has always been a landmark for me, and I try never to miss a performance.

We’ve come a long way since 1950, I guess it was. We later passed through a time when the “authentic” Baroque violin couldn’t use vibrato, and was expected to sound sort of gray. We’ve come out of that too. Fabio Biondi’s Europa Galante, the 11-member “authentic” Italian ensemble that played Baroque-era music in Disney Hall the other night, performed on contemporary-looking violins (plus a great-looking old lute) and played with style, strength, clarity – and vibrato. They performed that D-minor Concerto I was telling you about; they whizzed through its convolutions and paused only briefly in its melodic moments – as Vivaldi’s own forces surely might have done. They also played a set of dances by Purcell that included the “Aire” that Benjamin Britten used for his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Nothing sounded ancient and dry; everything sounded fresh and “authentic.”

Three of the works were by Vivaldi, which was fine because of the marvelous robustness of his style and the genuine sadness he could muster in his slow movements. At the end, there was a set of single movements by eight composers, each of them a dance imitative of some national style of the late 17th century, all of them charming and clumsy in an endearing way and, for reasons beyond any serious musical sense, utterly enchanting.

nbsp;Ever on Sunday

Grant Gershon began his monthly Sunday Master Chorale program, at Disney, with a set of choral songs by Poland’s Henryk Górecki honoring the Virgin Mary, composed in 1985, 10 years after that minimalist composer’s Third Symphony, but seven years before it became what Gershon accurately described as a “fund-raising anthem for NPR stations coast-to-coast.” Card-carrying Góreckiites expecting a replay of the anguished white-on-white tunes from that work may have been dismayed at the Disney Hall concert on Sunday night; others, myself included, found the music touching in its simplicity. For Górecki to have composed so ardent and loving a setting of these sacred texts in a politically charged atmosphere seems to me courageous enough.

Gershon’s good work with his chorus is widely known and honored, perhaps more for their participation with other major projects than for their independent concert series. I had not realized until Sunday’s concert, for example, that they have embarked on a systematic survey of a truly important repertory project, performing the late Masses of Joseph Haydn, one per year: grand and grandiose works of Haydn’s final years, full of the wisdom absorbed in his London visits, therefore solidly aglow with the choral spirit of Handel, and at the same time marvelously rich with the melodic and harmonic wisdom of Haydn himself, this grand old innovator in the glow of mature wisdom. Sunday’s concert ended with a Mass in B flat, titled the “Theresa Mass” for reasons nobody knows. Its date is 1799. Haydn had already composed his last symphony, the “London,” with its amazing shifts of harmony like nothing he had attempted before. Some of these turn up in the long quartet for soloists in the “Gloria” in this Mass; the harmonies in the “Benedictus” are also lush and lovely, looking across the century gap toward, perhaps, Schubert. It’s a wonderful piece, lasting about half an hour; wouldn’t it be great if there were a church in town where music like this could be performed in its proper setting? (No, not the Cathedral, too big and too much echo.) Anyhow, I’ve got to stop neglecting these people; they’re an okay chorale.

Genius, Age 27

He’s real, he’s ours: Gustavo Dudamel.

You could almost say they were made for each other, even to a similarity of hairdo – Hector Berlioz, who astounded musical society with his Symphonie Fantastique at the age of 27, and the Philharmonic’s maestro-designate, Gustavo Dudamel, who at the same age delivered Berlioz’s almost-masterpiece to a capacity, cheering Disney Hall audience last weekend.

The Symphonie Fantastique, concocted by Berlioz as a kind of woozy allegory for his unrequited passion for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson (whom he later married and came to regret), makes its way uneasily through the repertory. Devotees of French music – the formidable Nadia Boulanger, for one – have told me that they would prefer that Berlioz hadn’t existed at all. Too much of his heart appears on his sleeve, in this work and in some others, violating the easy generalities that one likes to posit about the French musical spirit. Perhaps it’s necessary, therefore, for a young spirit – a preternaturally wise 27-year-old musical spirit from another continent – to shake things up a bit. Enter Gustavo.

Dudamel’s exuberant, but also admirably wise, performance honored small details – the balance of brass tone against strings in the “Ball” movement, for example – that I hadn’t noticed in half a hundred previous live encounters. His performance had surge and impulse and, in the glorious vulgarities of the final movements, a command of orchestral balance that preserved sonorities. All repeats were honored, allowing for Berlioz’s formal design to take its proper shape. In his few times here, Dudamel has mastered the shape of Disney Hall, so that some of the magical acoustic moments in the score – the conversations between the shepherds in the slow movement, with woodwinds spread far apart – were captured in proper dimension. It was, all told, a performance of the work in real proportion, not only thrilling in the grandiose moments but eloquent and captivating in ways that might have astonished the composer himself.

Esa-Pekka Salonen provided a shadowy presence for his successor-to-be in the form of his 20-minute orchestral work Insomnia, which opened the program; Prokofiev’s jaunty First Piano Concerto, a showoff piece nicely performed by the young Simon Trpceski followed, music useful only to show young Trpceski’s power to bang on the keyboard. (A Debussy arabesque, a charming encore, showed off much more.)

nbsp;Second Fiddling

Earlier in the week, Dudamel was pressed into service in one of the Philharmonic’s Chamber Music Society programs, as second violinist in Mozart’s wonderful A-major Clarinet Quintet. As with the orchestral concert, this drew a full, cheering house, for any chance to see, no less hear, the town’s latest wonder boy, but perhaps not so much to hear chamber music and obey its rules. As it happened, there wasn’t much to hear; a second-fiddle role in a Mozart Quintet doesn’t consist of much in the way of solo ops. Philharmonic concertmaster Martin Chalifour had asked the crowd, please, not to applaud between movements “unless you absolutely have to.” Apparently, the crowd absolutely had to, because there was applause after every movement, ruining Michele Zukovsky’s sublime performance in the Clarinet Quintet and the whole of Mozart’s C-major String Quintet as well. Anyone who applauds, or even breathes, after the slow movement of the Clarinet Quintet just hasn’t been listening.

Which brings up a question I’ve been meaning to ask, or a complaint I’ve been meaning to air: What has happened to chamber music in our town? Chamber music is the result of playing together over long periods by ensembles, who develop a oneness of style and become known for an attitude toward performance, the same way that symphony orchestras hone their tone and their personality by working under a specific conductor. However skilled the individual members of the Philharmonic, I do not hear this quality in the Chamber Music Society concerts I’ve attended at Disney Hall. The Mozart Quintet performance with Dudamel is a case in point; he was in town, therefore available, and so it was a good PR trick to add him to the Mozart program. Immediately, that’s no longer chamber music. Janine Jansen, visiting violin soloist from the Netherlands, sat in on the program the week before; again, that becomes celebrity booking, not chamber music.

I mourn the passing of long-time-constituted string quartets, and chamber-music series with permanent memberships, playing repertory. It’s one more of the losses we suffered when LACMA shut down the Monday Evening Concerts, because one of my last memories from that series was the Parisii Quartet coming in with late Beethoven quartets. I long to hear the Cavatina of Opus 130 the way they played it the last time here. The Guarneri Quartet has disbanded after a distinguished career; I never got to hear the Alban Berg. Memories of the Sequoia Quartet still haunt me; I am tempted by new names in the New York ads, but I don’t see them here. There is hope: The Calder Quartet sound better all the time, and they have begun to play late Beethoven quartets. I just hope that the Colburn School, their local base, will have the good sense to hold on to them long enough to develop a repertory, and reveal to generations of bright-eyed students, pushing into those splendid new buildings on Grand Avenue, the miracles of Opus 130 and the Mozart Quintet, and when to applaud and when not to.

Not So Stinky

Eduard Hanslick, a.k.a. Beckmesser, cast one of his notorious thunderbolts in the direction of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in 1881 when the ink on its mss. was barely dry, and generations of us hot-pen scriveners have feasted on his words ever since. “It gives us for the first time the hideous notion,” Hanslick wrote, “that there can be music that stinks in the ear.” Well, Herr Hanslick was 53 when he delivered that monumental dictum; since I am no longer that, it may be the right time to re-examine those words in the light of my own experiences with the work in question, the most recent of which was the exhilarating, elegant and altogether winning version of it delivered at Disney Hall just a few nights ago by an admirable Dutch musician named Janine Jansen. I have lived through tortured performances by aging virtuosos – Bronislaw Huberman, for one, who lopped a whole five minutes from the last movement (it didn’t help) – and breathtaking, showoff affairs by the likes of Heifetz, who certainly supported the Hanslick view of the piece. Ms. Jansen’s performance, beautifully echoed by her countryman Edo de Waart and the Philharmonic, was neither of the above; it was swift without being the least heartless, lyrical without schmaltz (or whatever they call it in Amsterdam) and utterly beautiful. It set me on a whole new path of thinking about the piece, which is what a great performance should do.

I wish I could say the same about Schumann’s Third (“Rhenish”) Symphony, which filled out the program – the way Styrofoam fills out a package. I have no Hanslick quotation for this sorry smudge of a work, although this from a British paper of 1856 – “trivial in idea and poor in resource” – will do. There are nice sounds here: horns and winds in E flat, their most congenial key, but no rhythms or motion to send them along. The other Schumann symphonies conquer this motion problem with prettier tunes; this one starts out as a sad and noble failure and remains that way.

Ms. Jansen returned 24 hours later, on a Philharmonic “Chamber Music Society” night, with five colleagues, in an even more daunting task – to try to turn a real clunk from Tchaikovsky’s pen, the string sextet called Souvenir de Florence (12 years later than the Concerto and nowhere near as rewarding), into half an evening’s worth of happy listening. It didn’t work; whatever delight Tchaikovsky may have gleaned from his Italian journeys did not translate into anything nearly as lively as his Italian Caprice of many years previous. All that saved this gloomy, meandering work, in fact, was its superiority to its program mate, the wretchedly thick and dreary B-flat String Sextet by Johannes Brahms. Where was Herr Hanslick when we needed him?

Amen to That

My deep-purple words written under the spell of Olivier Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen in our last week’s visit were written under the spell of music of similar color at the last “Piano Spheres” concert; those who have teased me about them, and were not at the concert, have only themselves to blame. Beyond their just deserts, they have been accorded a reprieve, since that astonishing work formed the major substance of last weekend’s “Jacaranda” concert “at the edge of Santa Monica,” and if you missed it this time, it’s there on a New Albion disc by the same performers, the piano duo known as Double Edge. With honest respect to Joanne and Mark at “Piano Spheres” – wonderful, brave players – the Double Edge performance, on disc and at the First Presbyterian Church last Saturday, ranks among my sublime experiences. Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles formed Double Edge in 1978. They have also played with Steve Reich’s Musicians almost since the beginning of his time. It tells you the stature of the Jacaranda people that they brought Double Edge out here for their own Messiaen celebration, and also for a major William Bolcom work.

Bolcom’s 1971 Frescoes is, like most of his best works, a “jumble of half-remembrances” that poke at you delightfully – this time from an assortment of keyboards, in other works a variorum of other kinds of etceteras. In a sense, the work set the tone for the entire program, which meandered agreeably past a couple of shorter Messiaen works – the evocative horn call from Canyons to the Stars and an early set of variations that had the feature, unique for Messiaen, of letting us know at every moment exactly where we were in the music. Once again, the “Amen” Visions projected no such message, however. I cannot yet reach ground zero in its vastness; someday I will.

Shared Saturdays

After all those years of solitary Saturdays by the radio, suddenly the Metropolitan Opera airings have become public experiences, to common delight. People meet in the theaters where these new telecasts are shown, and talk over the previous week’s production. It’s only logical, therefore, that these events have now moved into the marketplace, all the more so since the quality of the projections and the sound is, or can be, so much better than a peanut-gallery seat at a lot of live opera hereabouts.

I saw the last two productions: Peter Grimes and Tristan und Isolde. The Grimes was a new production by John Doyle, who did the L.A. Opera’s Mahagonny and Broadway’s Sweeney Todd and Company. Those, I thought, were mostly fine; the Grimes completely wrong. Instead of the expanse of British fishing village extending toward sunrise, we got a flat, vertical wall up front pierced with windows and doorways – Suffolk agrave; la Louise Nevelson, betrayed by Britten’s horizontal expanse of music. There were great performances, by Anthony Dean Griffey and Patricia Racette and by the soaring, murderous orchestra under Donald Runnicles. After the devastating first-act curtain – “HOME, you call that a HOME???” – a squeaky-voiced soprano broke the spell to lead us on a backstage tour.

Deborah Voigt was the Isolde, as expected. The Tristan was the handsome and clear-voiced Robert Dean Smith, the last of four tenors to outlive a sad succession of illnesses and accidents (one of them hilariously caught on film) that had plagued the Met over the week, and he was perfectly fine – better by far than our John Treleaven. Jürgen Rose’s sets and costumes were full of Eurotrash geometrics and shifts of focus; give me David Hockney any day. But oh, that stupendous Met Opera Orchestra!

Good Old Sir Harry

Composer Harrison Birtwistle