Splendid Company at Disney Hall

Posted on February 20, 2008 by Alan Rich

Paradise Lost and Found

Robert Millard

Verdi’s Otello at the Music Center

“We are not the sole owners of our past,” wrote Jordi Savall, music’s great and original spirit, in a note accompanying his marvelous appearance at Disney Hall last week. His concert, with his ensemble of singers and players upon lovely old instruments, was devoted to music from “Hesperia,” an ill-defined area between the Italian and Iberian peninsulas whose musical fascination lay in its having housed a number of diverse cultures – Arab and Jewish, for example – who were able to live in peace and thus develop fascinating, hybrid artistic existences. Out of this remarkable melange emerged, among notable figures, Christopher Columbus, who, for all his reputation as an opportunist in his dealings in commerce, was also a serious observer of culture who kept large and important notebooks. One notebook page cited by Savall, which I find particularly fascinating in its power to lie across certain notebook pages of my own, is a leaf from the writings of the Roman poet and politician Seneca – yes, the old guy whom Nero does in in The Coronation of Poppea – prophesying the existence of a New World, which Columbus obviously took to heart.

Savall’s researches, which resulted in a marvelously diverse program of music relevant to the world around Columbus’ explorations, have always been more than mere concerts. With Hesperion “I, his own gathering of instruments, and the dedicated singing of his wife, Montserrat Figueras – whose voice seems to embody the spirits of the past even as its pure vocal elegance fades away – the serendipity of his concert programming always is about something. Even the impersonal setting of Disney Hall, with its austere electronic loudspeakers standing around, did not, this once, seem an intrusion. Something about Jordi Savall and his music making manages to conquer time. This recent program about Columbus-era music comes with a fat picture book: not inexpensive, but indispensable. The next project, glowingly reviewed in the latest Gramophone, is a book and a set of discs (on the group’s own Alia Vox label, handled in the U.S. by Harmonia Mundi) inspired by St. Francis Xavier and his excruciating journeys around Africa to India to bring about massive Christian conversions and the music that happened along the way.

nbsp;High C’s on the High Seas

It could be that Shakespeare’s Othello and his storied warriors were prowling other corners of the Mediterranean at about the same time as the Columbus gang; more important is that they showed up here last week more or less simultaneously with the Verdi version. Those of us with long memories cannot easily relinquish the L.A. Opera’s very first night, an Otello of 1986, with the curtain stuck on that most precipitous of all operatic openings. The new production was not thusly plagued; the curtain rose promptly, but on a curiously proportioned crowd scene, rocking back and forth on designer Johan Engels’ curved stage floor, which became an authentic visual plague as the opera wore on. (Example: the Cyprus Court Scene in Act 3, with the Governor’s throne unsettled in center stage and again seeming to rock back and forth.) Two massive, square tunnel openings, leading to nowhere in particular, flanked the stage. Some ill-defined lighting upstage in Act 3 may, or may not, have served as a vista of distant skyscrapers.

Ian Storey, fresh from Britain, was also fresh and invigorated in the role of Otello; it took very few lines of opera, however, just the curled, jet-black tones of his address to Roderigo not far into Act 1, to recognize who was to own this performance: the venom-tinged, insidious Iago of the unmatchable Mark Delavan, in his long-overdue local debut and in his effortless full embodiment of operatic evil at its unfurled fullness. Soprano Cristina Gallardo-Domas, the scheduled Desdemona, fell ill two days before opening curtain; the way these things work in the contemporary, well-oiled operatic machine, the Met was able to spring Russian soprano Elena Evseeva, a well-practiced Desdemona, just in time and then some. Barring no more than a glitch or two, Mme. Evseeva fulfilled her duty and perhaps a bit more.

To add to the weekend’s exhilaration, Falstaff, the other masterwork of Verdi’s ripest genius, was triumphantly and delightfully mounted by the newly reconstituted Opera UCLA, not at cavernous Royce Hall but sensibly at Schoenberg. Peter Kazaras was the stage director; Neal Stulberg led the exuberant orchestra; the Falstaff, Jeffrey Madison from the University of Minnesota, was singing the role for the first time in his life. O brave new world, and then some!

nbsp;Partial Recovery

It would be unfair to measure the success of James Conlon and the L.A. Opera’s “Recovered Voices” program on the measure of masterpieces restored from obscurity. The good work of the program should rest, I think, on a leveling of the field by filling in a repertory undeservedly lost through political elimination, whereupon these restored works would then gain or lose their place on the basis of quality. On this level, I would suggest that half of the double bill restored to circulation at the L.A. Opera this week was eminently deserving of the superb production (including Conlon’s musical leadership and the work of a superb cast) and half was not.

The deserving short opera was Alexander Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg (The Dwarf), which already has had some circulation in Europe but not in the Western U.S. Based on Oscar Wilde’s “Birthday of the Infanta,” a taut, ironic, actually rather vicious and therefore delightful short story, it has been given a gorgeous setting here, worthy of the Velasquez painting that inspired it, a perfect gem of a production by Darko Tresnjak on a stage set up by Ralph Funicello and Linda Cho.

Sharing the evening is Victor Ullmann’s The Broken Jug, another work – along with his Emperor From Atlantis – riding the deserved fame of its composer’s concentration-camp history, but in need by now of facing the reality that life in a concentration camp does not automatically bestow the halo of genius.

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Some Enchanted Evenings

Posted on February 13, 2008 by Alan Rich

Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is the elephant in the parlor, bedecked with garlands of roses. Its every dimension is wrong. From within the 85 minutes of Christoph Eschenbach’s performance with the Philharmonic last weekend, any composition student with an X-Acto knife could shape a nicely proportioned 40-minute symphony. Yet that is part of its singular charm. Midway through the first movement, you nod off in self-defense as Mahler’s irritating dissertation on life’s myriad agonies grinds on and on; you awake, aware of being bathed in a warm, winning, lightly orchestrated cynical smile. (Mr. Eschenbach compounded the agony by observing the optional first-movement repeat.) You drop off again, only to emerge into angelic, soft music as enchanting as anything you’ve ever heard in your lifetime. Then comes the lurid and brutal finale, which pins you to your seat with the sheer, gruesome intensity of its volume. The music – if such it be – zooms past logical ending after logical ending. Someone – percussionist Perry Dreiman – comes onstage to wield a mighty hammer against a large hollow box, as if a next-door neighbor might be banging against a wall in justifiable complaint.

I have to marvel: Little more than a week after the Flying Dutchmen from the Concertgebouw held me spellbound with the Mahler Fifth, music toward which I have been known to express strong reservations, here comes the even-more-oft-despised Sixth, and once again I have succumbed. This time, Mr. Eschenbach was the triumphant warrior in the cause. He allowed no such sissy paraphernalia as a score in front of him on a podium. He attacked the music with flailing fists and flashing glare – if you’re my age, you had to be reminded of Dimitri Mitropoulos, similarly bald of pate – and drew from our Philharmonic sounds hard-edged and nicely defined. He came here preceded by stories of not getting along in Philadelphia, where he served that city’s orchestra as music director for a time. Tough.

The Sixth is not easy music; it stands in for Mahler at a time of personal tragedy. You have to be prepared, as with any member of species mastodoni, for the precipitous stop, the sudden wounded outcry. The range of emotion in the work is astonishing; this, especially in the last movement, is part of its weakness. The moods swing back and forth toward what you think may be a final definitive statement, but then we are tumbled back into the swirl. The thwacks with a large hammer – Fate exerting its blows against the Protagonist – give the work its fame, with percussionist Dreiman exiting and entering to manage some offstage effects as well as the biz with his oversize croquet mallet onstage. (Mahler’s original score called for three hammer blows, including one that fells the Protagonist to end the entire work. The later edition, which is now commonly used, calls for only two, presumably to allow the poor guy another chance at Life. Also – I might as well tell you, since nobody has sworn me to secrecy – several Philharmonic folk slipped word to me that they feel that the hammer was too small. Talk about your misguided economies!)

nbsp;Thinking Smaller but Big

Midway in the slow movement of Mozart’s B-flat Piano Concerto (Kochel-Katalog 595, the last of the 27 concertos that bear Mozart’s name), the music subsides to a near nothingness. The orchestra maintains a steady, throbbing harmony, nothing more than a backdrop for a one-finger melody for the pianist – a kind of operatic aria, except without words. Mozart’s mature piano concertos are full of these moments of enchantment – check out K. 466, 467, 488, and prepare to swoon. Each of these moments becomes like a wordless stand-in for one of his great operatic characters: Susanna or Cherubino probably most of all. What great and constant companions they all become, even through a pianist’s single finger!

Last Sunday at UCLA’s Royce Hall, there ended a great and memorable undertaking, Jeffrey Kahane’s complete traversal of all 27 of Mozart’s works in this genre: early, delightful, clattering works with the keyboard and the small orchestra doing not much more than imitating one another in exchange of neat 18th-century tuneful patterns, moving through a miraculously short lifetime toward the late works, in which soloist and orchestra fall to profound discussions for which no words could suffice. Who could find, or need, the words for the one-finger interlude in K. 595? Or that giddy, syncopated episode that skips through the many tonalities in the finale? Or the marvelous comic-opera finale to K. 466, also on last Sunday’s program? Or, further back in our concert-going history, the deep melancholy in the slow movements of K. 482 and 488, and the miraculous way they resolve – sending shivers down our collective spines – in just the last few measures? Does anything in any of those Brobdingnagian Mahler symphonies match the brain-cleansing impact of those extraordinary works of musical conversation, none longer than half an hour, none requiring more than pairs of woodwinds and a couple of timpani? Fortunately, Mahler knew enough not to try.

This was the last of Kahane’s concerts in this series, conducting from the keyboard the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, which he has brought to level of a richness, clarity and high spirits worthy to collaborate in a Mozart project. In three years of Mozart immersion, he, too, has become a deeper, wiser – and, vital for Mozart, wittier – exponent of all this matchless music. We are all much the better. The orchestra continues, in Glendale’s Alex Theatre and at UCLA’s Royce Hall. Under Kahane, it has become one of the area’s great treasures; his performances of Haydn symphonies are also noteworthy. Many of its programs are carried on KUSC; its fame, I gladly report, spreads even further than that.

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Itzhak Perlman and Olivier Latry at Disney Hall

Posted on February 6, 2008 by Alan Rich

Dutch Treat

I envy anyone his first look at Amsterdam. You step out of Central Station and there is the perfect urban landscape: old buildings in grand array, trolleys in front, everything numbered so that you know exactly where to go. Never mind that it’s raining or, at least, damp. That was my Amsterdam arrival, two years ago, and the passion remains. The Concertgebouw, that stuffy, elegant home-away-from-home of a concert hall, all plush and velvet, is a short trolley ride away. Lord, I love that city, and the orchestra that is at home in that building.

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra has been in Los Angeles before, in 1982 at Ambassador Auditorium of fond memory, where it sounded clean and bright in mostly classical programs under Bernard Haitink. At Disney, 1,000 seats larger, it played louder, darker music for Mariss Jansons – Brahms and Mahler – and everybody loved the rich, deep brass, so different from our own bright, sharply defined sound. (I love them both.) What I found particularly magical was the wind tone. Dutch clarinetists are known for a particularly forthright way of aiming their instruments high, so that a lot of sound comes out – almost like old jazzmen, one friend noted. Since the two programs included Brahms’ Second Symphony, Strauss’ Don Juan and the Mahler Fifth, there was plenty of chance to hear this particular wind quality. Whatever the case, it made for marvelously lively, in-your-face music making, especially valuable in the case of the Brahms, which does, after all, have its lugubrious passages. On the other hand, the performance of Debussy’s La Mer struck me as somewhat beached. Our guys do it better.

The Mahler got to me, most of all. You can, of course, link the Concertgebouw Orchestra all the way back to a tradition of Dutch Mahler performance that includes extreme tempo fluctuations – far more than are printed in the score – and considerable use of that weepy manner of string attack that is now smiled down on as indulgence. There may still be old-timers in the orchestra who played under Willem Mengelberg – who, after all, knew Mahler and conducted in Amsterdam until his banishment in 1945. Recordings exist, some good ones from the late ’20s and early ’30s with some knockout brass and wind playing, and some poor stuff elsewhere in the orchestra, that at least try to preserve the droopy sliding from note to note in the strings that so charmed your grandma. Janssons will have none of this affectation. He is a strong, straightforward leader with a musical beat to match. Like ours.

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His Cup Runneth Over, Also Cracketh

The current Philharmonic program book lists an impressive credential for the conducting career of Itzhak Perlman, to set beside his distinguished stature as one of the greatest of living violinists. His engagement under both hats at Disney Hall last weekend raised some interesting questions, however, concerning the gulf between the phenomenon of extracting any old loud and audience-pleasing sounds from an orchestra in a concert hall by waving a stick at it, thereby eliciting cheers and a standing ovation, and the subtler phenomenon of producing beautiful and balanced sounds relevant to the music under examination. I have unleashed many words of praise toward Mr. Perlman’s artistry during our many years within each other’s earshot, but I have seldom if ever heard our Philharmonic as ill-used as it was under his baton last Saturday night – the second of the three-concert run, please note, and therefore not to be condoned as a sight-reading session.

Bach’s E-major Violin Concerto began the evening on a high level, with Perlman in his familiar role as soloist, the concerto with the solemn, rhapsodic slow movement and the tricky finale that works out mathematically exact. But then the violin was put away, the baton brought out. Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony ensued, with the orchestra oversize, the string tone coarse and outweighing the winds, allowing none of the airy, small-orchestra twinkle so important (and so lovely) in this music. The Brahms Fourth ended the evening, again with the crowd on its feet – cheering a great violinist’s illustrious career but surely not this one unfortunate excursion, with the strings harsh and the winds unbalanced with the texture of … well, of leftover Brahms. Perhaps even a night of Romantic French organ music, not my favorite noise, would sound good after this …
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Brouhaha

And so it did, in the very same concert hall the next night. The first notes that Olivier Latry drew from the Disney Hall organ – an arresting fanfare introducing something or other by a certain Tournemire with just an acid touch in the harmony to identify it as French – nicely cleared all that Brahms from the air.

He began with an assortment of trivial pieces by the French Romantic organists I have deplored in this space more than once – Durufle, Alain, Langlais, that crowd; went on to one more-substantial piece of singular religious hysteria, Messiaen’s L’Ascension, and ended with an improvisation of his own that was by all odds the best thing on the program. Someone handed up a sheet of paper with an inscription: something, I gather, from a letter by Messiaen. After a moment’s pondering, Latry evolved a twisted theme from that inscription. It grew and grew, reached a climax in about 10 minutes’ time, and came to a shapely and elegant, feathery ending. Church organists revel in this kind of trickery; this was one of the best I’ve heard, certainly better than anything on the printed program. Latry is titular organist at Notre Dame; that’s his instrument you hear groaning in that glorious edifice at noon every day – a job, he told the Disney crowd, he performs for glory and no money. I never did understand the economy of that country.