Last night’s Los Angeles Master Chorale concert in the Walt Disney appeared to be sold out.  The only thing that might surprise outsiders was that the advertising had emphasized that the program would be two works that were actually written in the twenty-first century.  Oh, it was a good concert!

The two works were by Steve Reich:  “You Are (Variations)” which the Chorale premiered in 2004 and performed in New York as part of the Reich birthday party, and the recent “Daniel Variations” for which this was the West Coast premiere.  Reich was at the sound controls handling the amplification.  “You Are” is a great work, and Grant Gershon makes this a signature piece.  I’m pretty certain that most of the singers, all four pianists, and all four marimba/vibes were the same as in the recording.  “Daniel Variations” uses similar resources, with a slightly smaller chorus (from 18 to 12) and a much smaller chamber orchestra (from 20 to 7 if I counted correctly), with the same four pianos and marimbas.  As has been commented on, the music makes the violin quite prominent, honoring the violinist who was Daniel Pearl.  Steve Reich (in his black baseball cap, of course) came down to the stage to join Gershon and the performers and receive the waves of applause and pleasure from the audience.

To complete the concert Grant Gershon gave us an interesting bit of programming.  Each of the two Reich works was preceded by two short motets, one by Josquin des Prez and one by William Byrd.  Instead of being linearly arranged on stage, the chorus for each set formed itself in a circle to the side of the stage, with Gershon in the center.  As a result, instead of a sound stage of individual voices, the combined voices rose as a column of sound, a column expanding to fill the hall.  The 400-year-old music was a pleasing introduction to the new.

Sunday afternoon’s Phil concert had the Stravinsky Violin Concert performed by Gil Shahan to give spark and verve to an otherwise uninteresting concert.  (Tchaikovsky’s “Hamlet” was boring, and it’s hard to get excited about the Schumann 2nd.)  The Stravinsky was elegant, and dry, and witty.  The two works surrounding it achieved so much less with so many more resources.

John Adams is almost 60 (February 15), and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella concert last night had Adams as conductor of three of his works.  It appeared to me to be the largest audience in the series, with even some people up in the organ-loft seats facing the conductor.  The concert was a pleasure, a treat.  Only a curmudgeon could have been dissatisfied at the exuberance and joy of the evening, feeling that serious music shouldn’t have that much fun associated with it.

The program opened with “China Gates” (1977), a work for piano solo in which Adams was using minimalist techniques with occasional appearances of a distinctive voice.  (I’ll use links to Adams’ own web site which gives a clip from each work.)  Then there was a vibrant, toe-tapping, romp of a performance of his concerto for clarinet and chamber orchestra, “Gnarly Buttons” (1996).  Derek Bermel, who was composer and soloist in his own concerto a few years ago, conducted by Adams, did a great job with this challenging solo role.  Surrounding the clarinet were four violins, two each violas, cellos and basses, trombone, English horn, bassoon, guitar/mandolin/banjo, piano and sampler keyboard (with a range of sound samples including a cow, who in this sample, in this hall, sounded severely injured).  This was fun. 

“Grand Pianola Music” (1982) was performed after intermission; you might be interested in reading Adams’ comments about this work by following the link and scrolling down.  This is an odd work, somewhat of a chamber concerto for two pianos and three sopranos.  I don’t particularly like the work on the recording I have; I found that a half hour of piano arpeggios got very tiring, and it was like being forced to listen to a recording of Liberace doing his Czerny exercises.  Last night, however, something clicked for me.  I felt the enjoyment and pleasure in the piece.  After letting the memory of last night fade a bit more I’ll go back to the recording and see how I react now.

As an additional recognition of Adams, the Phil’s concert last weekend, including a performance Sunday at Orange County’s new Segerstrom Concert Hall, had Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Adams symphony, “Naive and Sentimental Music” (1999).  The first work on the program was Beethoven’s Second.  As Mark Swed pointed out, we’ve come a long way since a new piece of music had to be both fairly short and first on the program so that the real music lovers wouldn’t have themselves contaminated by this modern stuff.  I’d bet that since the Phil gave the premiere in 1999, the Adams symphony has been on more Philharmonic programs than any other work, possibly excepting “Rite of Spring”.

The description in the title is how Messiaen described a section of the piano part in the second movement of his great “Quartet for the End of Time” (1941).  Last night’s Philharmonic chamber concert in Disney Hall came as close as I can imagine to enabling me to see sounds.  It was a gorgeous performance by members of the Phil (with CalArts’ Vicki Ray as pianist).  I’ve only been to one other live performance, and of course it’s one of the Messiaen tracks on my iPod, but the sound of the performance made it seem as if I was hearing sections for the first time. 

Sunday’s concert by the Phil was the second program of the season to be recorded for release on iTunes, and it’s another “must have”.  Salonen began with Webern’s “Five Pieces for Orchestra” (1913), a delight for the ears as well as for the brain.  The first time I heard the work was in the sound-limited Dorothy Chandler in the program in which Mehta introduced the work to the Philharmonic audience and quieted the audience filing in for the second work on the program by saying that since the work was so short he could understand how some were sorry they had missed it, so he played the work again.  On Sunday’s concert Salonen then led a great performance of Mahler’s Seventh (1905).  I’m glad I’ll have the recording of that performance.

There hasn’t been much contemporary music in Los Angeles over the past month.  (Does music over the holidays have to be so traditional?  Isn’t there much festive contemporary music?)  But we’re off to a decent start in January.  The first Philharmonic concert in 2007 had the hot, bright, young (25!) conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, conducting a program of Kodaly, Rachmaninoff (the 3rd, with Bronfman), and the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra.  Dudamel got great reviews when he first appeared at Hollywood Bowl, and his reviews of these concerts were raves.  The program was recorded and will be available next week on iTunes.  Mark Swed pointed out that it will be quite interesting to compare two live-concert recordings of Kodaly’s “Dances of Galanta”:  the NY Phil recording under Maazel, and the LA Phil’s with Dudamel as guest conductor. 

Last night’s “Green Umbrella” concert celebrated the 25th anniversary of the New Music Group of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  Esa-Pekka Salonen started with a well-deserved tribute to our former executive director, Ernest Fleischman, who is still present for most, if not all, of the concerts in the series.  The audience wasn’t large when Fleischman started things; our local audience wasn’t that much more adventurous than the group who would wait in the lobby of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion until the contemporary work was finished before going into the auditorium to take their seats.  (It took a lot of cajoling from Zubin Mehta to convince some of the season subscribers to accept having a work even remotely contemporary in the middle of a program.)   With Disney Hall, and attractive pricing of tickets for contemporary music, the audience expanded by more than a thousand.  It took a while, and two less-attractive venues, but new music in Disney Hall is a success.

For last night’s “Green Umbrella” new music concert at Disney, Salonen was back in town and served as composer as well as conductor.  The program was put together last Fall after Dawn Upshaw had to cancel her residency as she recovers from cancer, and it was a decent program.  The closing work was the premiere of Salonen’s “Catch and Release”, a work in three movements for the Stravinsky “soldat” ensemble:  violin, bass, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, percussion.  But Salonen has a markedly different musical sensibility, and Stravinsky’s dry sound and lean line was replaced by much more movement and activity; giving the percussionist a vibraphone as well as his other instruments worked to add a lot of warmth and softness to the sound, particularly in the reflective middle movement.  This was not my favorite piece by Salonen, but it had sparkle and drive.

The concert began with Lutoslawski‘s “Chain I” (1983) for 14 musicians (two violins, 12 other instruments, including harpsichord).  This work is one of the composers less dense “chains”, with only two strands, according to the program; each link leads to another in that strand, separate from the evolution in the other strand.  Near the end of the work Lutoslawski used some of the techniques he adapted from Cage and has the instruments independently performing, ad lib, in a set of complex songs.  This was my favorite work of the evning.

Next was Franco Donatoni’s “Hot” (1989) for saxophone, trumpet, trombone, piano, bass, percussion, a work that’s “cool” not “hot”.  My reaction through much of the work was that I was hearing a previously-unheard number by Ornette Coleman or the Modern Jazz Quartet, a work in which the musicians were engaged in introspective examination of how far the boundaries of melody or rhythm or scale could be expanded within jazz.  At times, though, the sound would revert back to that of a classical musician dealing with more popular forms.  Donatoni came awfully close to jazz.  Not coincidentally, Donatoni was one of Salonen’s respected instructors.

After intermission the Steven Stucky string quartet “Nell’ombra nella luce” (2000) was performed.  This was first played at a chamber concert in November, the concert that was part of the Thomas Ades residency this season.  Stucky uses traditional means to explore what a quartet after Shostakovich might sound like.  There is none of the Shostakovich anguish, but the language is the same.  Alan Rich’s review of the November concert didn’t praise the work, and I can understand his criticism.  It felt to me that the musical ideas hadn’t fully engaged Stucky, but it was a good performance of a pleasing work.

A sold-out REDCAT held a brilliant concert to celebrate the re-birth of our Monday Evening Concerts and to honor the late Dorrance Stalvey, the man who directed the concerts for almost 35 years.  The series had hit a rough patch when Stalvey became director (and curator of music at LACMA).  He brought creativity in programming and in performance to the series.  To recognize Stalvey’s contributions to our community and our music, Alan Rich provided a lovely tribute to the man in the concert’s written program, and the centerpiece of the concert was the performance of Stalvey’s last completed composition, “Stream” (2002) for violin and piano.  As appropriate for a modernist who also started an important jazz program at LACMA, “Stream” was resolutely modernist, except for a touch or two of bebop with some stride piano in the pianist’s left hand.

The program began with Luciano Berio’s “Circles” (1960), first performed in this series in 1962 and twice more under Stalvey’s leadership.  Written for Cathy Berberian, our performance had Christina Zavalloni dazzling us.  We heard her first back in March when she sang Andriessen’s “Inferno” as part of the Minimalist Jukebox series.  Last night she was an elemental force, prowling the stage, sometimes playing with the words and sounds, sometimes cajoling, sometimes commanding, at all times handling the fearsome leaps and techniques as mere trifles.  The piece supports the soprano with harp and two percussionists who each handled 15-20 different instruments, plus occasional vocalisations.  Our harp was the Phil’s Lou Anne Neill (playing this for the third time in this series); our percussionists were Ross Karre and Steven Schick (formerly the Banger percussionist), now with “red fish blue fish” at UCSD.  The soprano is given the words to three poems by e.e.cummings with which to use Berio’s notes.  Berio’s program notes from the 1962 Monday Evening concert contained the following summary:  “The theatrical aspects of teh performance are inherent in the structure of teh work itself which, most of all, a structure of actions:  to be listened to as theater and to be viewed as music.”  Oh, he would have been happy with last night’s performance.

Christina Zavalloni gave one encore, a performance of Berberian’s “Stripsody” (1966) for soprano solo.  The score, of which a page is copied below, courtesy of Sheet Music Plus, is a collection of sounds or phrases which might have been written into assorted comic strips.  Once again Zavalloni triumphed.

The concert ended with Gerard Gisey’s “Vortex Temporum” (1994-1996) for piano (Vicki Ray in a major part), violin (Mark Menzies), viola (Kazi Pitelka), cello (Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick), flute (Dorothy Stone), clarinet (Philip O’Connor).  Musicians from California E.A.R. Unit and Xtet (the two regular groups of Monday Evenings at LACMA) formed the group and Donald Crockett of USC and Xtet served as conductor.  Mark Menzies has a good commentary on the work, with sound clips, at this site.

The work has elements of real power.  The most impact on me was the conclusion of the first part of the work when the piano launches into a demanding, difficult, aggressive solo, culminating with a crash of sound that slowly decays.  Into this quiet a faint sound begins intruding; it isn’t a sound from outside, or from the mechanical equipment, it’s the noise of the bows slowly scratching along the strings and finally a note resolves itself in the sound.  I found myself holding my breath.

Bruce Hodges comments on a 2004 New York performance of the work, and he was just as swept away, but he remained much more coherent about it than I.

What a great re-start to a series that means so much to our musical lives.  The remaining three concerts of the year will be in Zipper Hall of Colburn School, a slightly larger venue with outstanding acoustics.  This is so much nicer than LACMA’s multi-purpose auditorium!

Tuesday night Thomas Ades was the guest pianist, filling Leonard Stein’s slot, in the Piano Spheres concert at Zipper Hall of the Colburn School.  This brought out the largest audience I’ve seen in a Piano Spheres concert, even larger than the audience for Gloria Cheng’s series opener.  The buzz about Ades has been good, to understate the reactions.  Perhaps our important piano series is beginning to get the audience it deserves.

The program to let us hear Ades, the pianist, was not showy or flashy.  It wasn’t new:  the whole second half of the program is on his EMI recording.  And while a few pieces were easy, even those were played with such commitment and conviction by Ades that I felt I understood what the composer heard in his mind while composing.  The program started with a survey of 40 years of the piano music of Janacek; first was a grouping of five short pieces, beginning with a work from 1886 and ending with a fragment from 1928.  This was followed “In the Mist” (1912) by the middle-aged, unsuccessful, teacher/composer whose opera had not yet been accepted by Prague; as pianist, Ades successfully presented the hesitency and introspection in Janacek.  The Janacek was followed by two of his own works with elements of introspection, both early, both of which are on his debut recording,  “Darknesse Visible” (1992) and “Traced Overhead” (1996).  “Darknesse” has the brilliant student exploring and re-making a 1610 Downling song for lute; “Traced Ovehead” was a commission for the 25-year-old from the pianist Imogen Cooper; the title has been picked up as the title of a festival of the music and the conducting of Ades to be given at the Barbican in March and April of 2007.

The second half of the concert comprised ten of the short pieces in Niccolo Castiglioni’s “How I Spent the Summer” (1983), followed by three short works by Stravinsky.  The concluding work was Conlon Nancarrow’s “Three Canons for Ursula” (1988), written for Ursula Oppens, for which the middle canon was thought to be unplayable and had been withheld.  Kyle Gann has the story.  Ades played the unplayable, without sweat, and without seeming to apply any more concentration than he did on the little waltz that Stravinsky wrote for children to be able to play.  That man has talent.

On Sunday we attended the concert by the Philharmonic not on one of our series, despite the fact that the second half was a not-a-favorite symphony by a not-a-favorite composer.  We felt that we could easily withstand the Tchaikovsky 6th to be able to hear Ades as composer and conductor leading the Phil in a performance of “Asyla” (1997).  We first heard this in Ojai with Rattle conducting the Phil; the recording was an early transfer to my iPod.  Sunday’s performance was another of those which I wish were available as a recording.  I thought that Ades and the Phil gave a more interesting, and more persuasive, performance than Rattle’s recording.  It’s a good work, and Ades is a good composer.  In an unequal allocation of skills, Thomas Ades is also a pretty good conductor; yes, his technique with his left arm could use a little improvement, but he’s better than some other composers we know.  His beat is clear and well-maintained; he handles changes of meter very smoothly, and watching him from the audience helps you understand what the music is doing.

It’s not fair.  Pianist, composer, conductor.  And young.  And he seems to be a nice guy.  I hope it’s true that he returns soon, and regularly.

By the way, that Tchaikovsky “Pathetique” was the first conducting assignment at a subscription concert by the Phil’s assistant conductor, Joana Carneiro.  She led a very persuasive interpretation, making the symphony more cohesive and less painfully “pathetic” than usual.  I lasted through the performance with no trouble.  She deserved the audience compliments she received.