So I’ve Heard

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLPE? Surely not Eric Huebner!
This is what we know about Stefan Wolpe (Born in Berlin to Jewish parents, 1902– died in New York, 1972) a member of the Bauhaus, he befriended the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters; emigrated to Palestine, 1933; to New York, 1938, supported himself by  teaching harmony to jazz musicians; as head of experimental Black Mountain College, in the 1950s,  he rubbed shoulders with musical polemicists Morton Feldman, John Cage and David Tudor. His First Symphony, commissioned for Bernstein’s ill-advised  “avant-garde festival” with the NY Philharmonic in 1963, was curtailed at its premiere because of “extreme difficulty”; his knock-‘em-in-the-aisles Battle Piece (“Encouragements for Piano,” ‘Battles, Hopes, Difficulties, New Battles, New Hopes, No Difficulties’) was dedicated to Tudor. Beyond all this, he was one of the 20th Century’s  most potent, unquenchably inventive creative personalities.
That work, the Wolpe Battle Piece,  formed one  bright spot of  a major and stirring weekend musical  event up at Villa Aurora, the haven in the Palisades for exiled German artists, currently maintained by that country’s Consulate General. The program’s other major work, no less complex and demanding, was the last of Victor Ulllmann’s seven Piano Sonatas, a hugely affirmative outburst built around variations on a short Schoenberg piano piece. Best known for the satirical short opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis (performed in Long Beach last month) composed during his imprisonment at the Teresienstadt camp, Ullmann included in his Sonata the inscription “The right of performance remains with the composer.” Shortly after completing the work, Ullmann was transported to Auschwitz and its gas ovens.
The concert at Villa Aurora was an important event, a gathering of  music created as mortal fears darkened Germany’s skies, valuable and  interesting programming by the Villa’s newly appointed Program Director, Daniel Rothman.  I have never been a strong upholder of Ullmann’s Kaiser , which I hear as excessively contrived Carl Orff, but this Seventh Sonata is something else again, a masterpiece etched in blood. Eric Huebner’s performance – remember his amazing work in Messiaen’s From the Canyons a few months back? – swept through that historic room with its magical seaside vista. As dessert there was also friendlier music: Schoenberg’s Fantasy for Violin and Piano, eloquently delivered, Eric’s astonishing piano command and more of the same from Mark Menzies’ exuberant violin.
SEASONAL  ENDINGS: I’m not quite sure, the significance of guest conductor Christoph Eschenbach’s once-again choice of the Bruckner Seventh Symphony, as the Philharmonic’s seasonal closer-downer, but he did so, once again, as in recent years, and drew  some noble noise from our orchestra’s brass contingent. Even better was that concert’s opening work, one of Mozart’s most congenial “middle” symphonies – No. 34, in C: a joyous essence,  music that simply  trips over itself  in a paroxysm of giggling trills and triplets. More, please!

TRIVIATA: La Traviata was my first-ever full-scale operatic experience: 1941, with Licia Albanese and Jan Peerce, myself enthralled in standing room, with the Met  on tour, in a Boston movie palace. Memory is a fragile substance;  being no ardent admirer of  Mrs. Domingo’s flannelly dramaturgy, I had determined to sit out the L.A. Opera’s current revival of Verdi’s verdant weeper — until the news began to circulate that,  clunky production and all, the Traviata this time around was the one not to miss. That news was, as they say, spot-on.

Marina Poplavskaya had sung her first-ever Violetta in Amsterdam only last month, and sang it here once more. She is a dreamer’s Violetta. Russian by birth, dark and strong of feature (if blonde in her program-book photo). She commands the role, and the stage, with a voice deep and rich, intense and flawless. She does not mess with her music; there was no show-off, interjected E-flat in her “Sempre libera” to woo the gallery; the heartbreak in her scene with the elder Germont arose from Verdi’s music alone, not from any painted-on theatricals. Grant Gershon was the conductor, a company debut long overdue, a master of the essence of sung opera. From their first music together there was an eloquence, an elegance, an exactitude of accent that you dream about – but seldom get to hear — in this music. that raises and maintains the emotional temperature and makes you aware of that rare and wonderful emotional richness that defines  Verdi’s greatness when the accents are sure and loving. As the Germonts father and son neither  Andrzei Dobber nor Massimo Giordano sang  their music as the roles deserved. The Alfredo was brave, but not well advised, to attempt the killer cabaletta (”O mio rimorso”) that wiser spirits usually omit. This was a Traviata about an authentic heroine, and about her power to define for an  audience an authentic human tragedy.
SO FAR — I turn 85 next week — SO GOOD.

WELCOME: John Adams has been in town these past weeks, as good company as company can get. He came with some of his own music, which was wonderful enough. What’s more, at a Green Umbrella concert, the last of the season, he introduced two new, promising young composers, and surrounded their arrival with an excellent program-book essay on his hopes for music’s future. Next season he will be often at hand, enthroned in the Philharmonic’s newly endowed Creative Chair. His words and his deeds constitute an affirmation that the Philharmonic’s role in the advancement and enrichment of serious music will remain in strong hands.
At the Green Umbrella there was something new by Adams to treasure, namely Son of Chamber Symphony which is, as the name whimsically suggests, a sequel of sorts, composed for the chamber group Alarm Will Sound. The whimsy lies in more than merely the title; this is a work of serious fun; the Mark Morris  choreographed version is aptly titled Joyride. Bits and pieces from previous well-liked Adams works filter through the light-hearted texture. Michele Zukovsky’s solo clarinet gets a particular workout. I loved every note.
Two composers made themselves known and admired under the Umbrella, their combined ages short of Adams’s but scarcely wet behind the ears.  Two pieces by Tiimothy Andres, 24, shared a format: an ongoing musical narrative broken into by planned intrusions. The first, titled How Can I Live in Your World of Ideas? answered that question quite handily with an attractive pitched battle between a solo piano and an intruding percussion group. The second, Nightjar, also honors its namesake, a nocturnal insect given to chirps and pulsations. In between came Cowboy Tabla/Cowboy Raga by Payton MacDonald, 35, music also composed for Alarm Will Sound, created through manipulations on an acoustic marimba and also, says the composer, the result of an Idaho-born composer traveling halfway around the world.
I had fallen for  Adams’s The Flowering Tree in San Francisco, in 2007, and did so again  at the Philharmonic concert a couple of days later.. Peter Sellars’ words — a haunting, evocative re-working of a heart-rending and -warming  Indonesian legend, of lovers separated and rejoined,  in a fairytale setting exotic and magical — have drawn from Adams some of his most powerful musical drama, exquisite, stirring, deeply throbbing. There was magic, too, in the Sellars production, capturing even on the defeating, blank surfaces of the Disney stage  something close to the powerful drama of the story itself. Above the stage sat Grant Gershon’s Master Chorale, costumed as a living rainbow, hurling forth their commentary and participation in the drama. The three Indonesian scene-stealers were back with their phenomenal solo danceries; the trio of solo singers: Jessica Rivera, Russell Thomas and Eric Owens, were as splendid as before. Listen for yourself on the indispensable Nonesuch CD.

SUNDAY BEST: Juan Bautista Sancho’s dates are roughly the same as Haydn’s. Born on Mallorca, he later set sail for Mexico. After a time of study, he moved northward, landing at Monterey in 1804. There he founded a choir and set about creating a repertory, some of which made for a delightful sampling by the adventurous forces of Martin Haselböck’s Musica Angelica at Santa Monica’s First United Methodist, to start an uncommonly busy Sunday. The music – a motet and two movements of a Mass – was sweet, tuneful, and very much worth exploring. I hope there’s more. The program also included some genuine Haydn, a ravishing concerto for violin, organ and strings and a setting  of Salve, Regina, stern and dramatic. I hope there’s more of that, too.
Eastward, thence, to UCLA’s Royce Hall and the season’s final concert by the L.A. Chamber Orchestra, this one less worth writing home about than most in the series. Somehow, LACO’s record at new-music unearthing or commissioning has never been one of its strong points. This latest venture, a half-hour of drab modernist cliché titled Radiant Mind, supposedly Buddhist-inspired, commissioned by Sound Investment from the prolific American composer Christopher Theofandis is, I regret to report, the latest in a poignant succession of truly uninteresting LACO commissions extending many years back in our time together. Schumann’s Piano Concerto ensued, music I have no difficulty identifying as perfect, even – as in this instance – with those priceless notes sort of hammered into place with the mechanistic acumen of a Jonathan Biss and not much more.
Then Westward once again, to the precincts of the excellent Broad Stage on the Santa Monica College campus. There the visiting maestro Kent Nagano had assembled a truly weird program including something-or-other by Stockhausen for solo bassoon performed by a musician in a trained-bear suit, other music no less fascinating and involving in performance a pair of Inuit throat-singers and, to cap a most diverting day of musical serendipity, a perfectly fine production of Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale, Nagano conducting,  in a staging by Hollywood’s own William Friedkin. That’s the way it should be.

THEY’RE STILL OUT THERE
The following, which the good people at Jacaranda received recently and have allowed me to send along, might be worthy of comment. At least I hope so.

Subject: Pretentious Bullshit
I just received your advertising card for The OM Century Final Concert.
Lots of “premiere” performances.  There’s a reason they are premiere
performances.  No one else was interested.
It’s simply not true that every generation has its great composers and
artists.  It’s far more complicated than that.  When was the last great
Greek play written?
Just because someone studied music, understands it, and writes in a form
that seems serious does not mean that their music is worth listening to.
You’re presenting what is largely crap that will be forgotten real fast
except by those who need some kind of identity which is intertwined with
pretentious bullshit.
And don’t think that the words “accessible” and “not as accessible” will
mask what’s going on.  The music you’re presenting is as accessible as a
Straus waltz, it’s just that it’s not worth listening to.
I’m sure Swed loves the stuff.  But then for him, anything new equals
good.
Comments, please.

KID STUFF: Jacaranda’s very large season’s finale takes place on Saturday, May 9, at Barnum Hall, which is the large auditorium of Santa Monica High School, on 4th Street just south of Pico. Something very big by Messiaen will conclude the two-year celebration of that composer’s centennial.
Something even bigger has occupied several hours of my last couple of days, the DVD on Opus Arte (distributed by Naxos) of Messiaen’s huge opera Saint-François d’Assise. Saint Francois d’Assise [DVD Video]The production is from the Netherlands Opera, directed by Pierre Audi, — whom we know from two sublime Monteverdi productions brought here — conducted by Ingo Metzmacher: an extraordinary visual experience, a setting for this humanistic document exactly right for its character and for the message it strives to deliver.
There is no stage, in any theatrical sense. We are spectators at the periphery of a huge room, whose floorboards show their roughness. At one side is a lumber pile of discarded crosses in various disrepair; behind, ringed by scaffolding and partly visible, is Metzmacher and the orchestra. The action moves in and around these gatherings, with François, a stern, suffering figure in his rough robe of animal skins. The ecstasy of Messaien’s orchestra – the clatter of percussion and the howl of the Ondes Martenot, seems to pour down upon us. Saint François is Covina’s own Rod Gilfry, Seville’s Barber and A Streetcar’s Stanley, now a solemn and moving singing actor of rich lyricism and dignified bearing.
He cuts a distinguished figure, tall and stern, in a rough robe that sweeps the floor. (All his saintly brothers are similarly robed, but in different strong colors.)   For three hours the stage colors are mostly drab, contrasted only against the lurid yellow as the Leper makes his tortured appearance, to be cured by François’ kiss. An Angel (Camilla Tilling) comes snooping around the precincts, asking rude questions of the Brethren and drawing unsatisfactory answers. The Angel reappears in resplendent get-up, plays a viol solo and causes François to faint.
Still here?
Then comes the miracle. The stage explodes — and the music too!! – into vivid color. François addresses his worldwide convocation of birds, an enchanted gathering of children, colorfully robed, bare of foot, angelic of mien. They are Birds; armed with colored chalk they scrawl their ornithological names on the broken Crosses. They dance; they leap into François’ arms; the glorious clatter of their music is irresistible. The episode that has been an endless bore in every staged Saint-François I have seen up to now (and even drew boos at the Paris première; don’t tell me, I was there) is now transformed by stage magician  Audi into sheer enchantment.

The juvenile gathering on the cover of the Medici Arts DVD release (also from Naxos) of Janacek’s Cunning Little Vixen is hardly less enchanting These are the kids who play the Vixen’s and the Fox’s scampering offspring at the moment of the opera’s tragic end; some also are used in other animal roles earlier on. We are well supplied with versions of this powerful, moving, irreplaceable opera: a  previous version in Czech with Thomas Allen as the Forester,  a charming animated English version by Geoff Dunbar, conducted by Kent Nagano but somewhat cut, and the creation by East Germany’s Walter Felsenstein, on which our awareness of the opera is mainly based, and which Naxos rescued and issued in an essential seven-disc collection of that legendary director’s work last year.
In this new, exellent version the action occurs, not in the forest of  Janácek’s “merry thing” but in a vast field of sunflowers: almost as good. A railroad track pierces it from right to left: humanity inflicting its misery.  Elena Tsallagova is the chestnut-crowned Vixen, wondrously svelte as she steals the heart of foxy Hannah Esther Minutillo (and us all). Michèle Lagrange is the Forester, somewhat ill-tempered for this wise and all-knowing role. (There was no-one like Rudolf Asmus, who sang it for Felsenstein.) The performance is from the Opéra de Paris; Dennis Russell Davies is the eloquent conductor. A 25-minute video  “bonus” begins with jabberwocky from the ubiquitous Gérard Mortier, but settles down to quite a nice interplay with stage director André Engel and those kids.

THE TIN CUP
This morning I sat in my doctor’s waiting room, a prisoner to Station KUSC during one of the days of its recurrent appeal for funds. The announcer, my good friend Alan Chapman, was talking about “beautiful music” and extolling the role of the station in making that substance generously available. To illustrate his talk he was playing very beautiful pieces:  Liszt’s “Liebestraum,” the “Nimrod” Variation from Elgar’s Enigma, the 18th Variation from Rachmaninoff’s “Paganini” Rhapsody, a mournful moment from Elgar’s Cello Concerto, on and on. He was running these pieces in quick order, seguing from one to the next, never allowing any one to end. All in the name of demonstrating beautiful music or…to my taste, the power of overdoses of beautiful music to drive a listener up the wall.
Some of you have asked about that word “DONATION” to the right of this blog. As with KUSC and KPCC and KCRW, I am attempting to support my work on contributions. Unlike those organizations, at the moment I have no other source of support; as  I noted in a recent report, publications running cultural criticism have been firing their writers right and left these days.
One difference: I can conduct my fund drives without changing the tone of this blog itself. I don’t have to hold readers hostage, as KUSC was doing this morning, or as KPCC was doing for two agonizing weeks last month while the country begged on its knees for news and more news. (Wellll, maybe not the country, but I did.)
David-my-Blogmaster is setting up a Paypal system the workings of which I know now not. Any day, we’ll have that tin cup out on the sidewalk.