Silverlake Blvd.

Songs & dances : Wynston Marsalis, Roxy Music, Florence Price, & Margaret Bonds

 

9/8/22. Winston Marsalis's "All Rise" at the Hollywood Bowl

 

My mousepad melted to my desk. Even at the Bowl it never cooled down. But Wynston Marsalis’s “All Rise” (1999) was the most enjoyable and moving concert I’ve heard in a while. It’s a big (he Phil, five soloists, five choirs, and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra) modernist collage that proceeds by contrast rather than narrative. The sections jolt with opposing moods and sonorities.

 

Marsalis himself didn’t make an entrance. We wondered if he was there – until the big screen camera caught him at work in the trumpet section. Part of the team, exactly like the music: MW working with multiple musical traditions of North and South America, plus extended conversations with Stravinsky and Bernstein (“Jubal step”), Copland (“Wild strumming of fiddle”), Ellington (“Expressbrown local”) among others.

 

 

 

9/28/22. Roxy Music at the Kia Forum

 

Still beastly hot. Instead of partying all afternoon – as in the old days – in preparation for the Roxy Music concert, we napped and had a bowl of cold leftover pasta and slices of half of a tomato.

 

The Forum was lit all lavender and dark rose. The crowd seemed to be mostly people who had seen Roxy at the Palladium in 1972. I can only boast to have seen them at the Greek at the turn of the century. I remember that they really rocked out and ignored the ballads (also that there were Las Vegas style showgirls and one of my party slipped on a syringe that rolled down the aisle).

 

I hadn’t been at a big rock concert in a long time (Pearl Jam, Milwaukee, 2006) and marveled at the continuity of traditions (indoor clouds of smoke) and the novelties (roadies breaking down one set and installing another efficiently with a gleaming mini-forklift, digital panels so delicate that the screens were invisible in normal light).

 

The show began with a seductive instrumental (“India”) then blasted off with rousing audio and visual cacophony (“Re-Make/Re-Model”).

 

I’ve always dismissed “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”  as a novelty song, but in person it’s impressive and audacious.

 

“Tara” was perhaps my favorite moment. Andy McKay on sax, with thundering piano by one of the back-up kids (each member of the original team was spotted by sharp younger musicians: two keyboardists, a woman on sax, three glorious back-up singers in spangles, two extra guitarists).

 

The credible performance of “Avalon” was an unexpected treat.

 

 

 

11/5/22. “A Musical Portrait: Price and Bonds” at Disney Hall

 

The most adventurous program of the season and it was thrilling. My take-away was that while Bonds may be a more polished composer – and perhaps had more advantages – Price (1887-1953) is more inventive and idiosyncratic. She’s a valuable neoromantic voice.

 

This presentation also highlighted Price’s wit. The finale to her Symphony No. 1 in E minor (1932) was animated fun. Her wonderful “Four Encore Songs” began with “Tobacco”, with words by Graham Lee Hemminger: “Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it. / It satisfies no normal need. I like it. / It makes you thin, it makes you lean, / It takes the hair right off your bean. / It’s the worst stuff I’ve ever seen. / I like it.”

 

I hear Bonds’s “Troubled Water” fantasia for solo piano on KUSC pretty often and it makes me want to hear more of her music. We should know all about it. She even lived the last part of her life in L.A.

 

At this concert she was represented by a generous selection of songs, and the second, fifth, sixth and seventh parts of her orchestral masterpiece “Montgomery Variations”. Fifteen months earlier the Phil played the first, third, fourth, and seventh parts at the Bowl. So in a sense I’ve heard the whole piece. But may I be outrageously greedy and request the Phil play the whole work – all seven parts – in one go? Is that asking too much? The publishers say it’s only 28 minutes total.

 

Chopping “Montgomery” into pieces was part of the problem of this concert. In the bad tradition of programs that try to make up for the neglect of worthy composers it sabotaged itself by going on too long, featured excepts rather than whole compositions, sequenced things for variety rather than chronology, presented arrangements rather than original versions (why?), and wasted space in the program with PR puffery instead of information.

 

The complicated stage management challenges were not handled efficiently. After the “Montgomery Variations” there was an ovation, the house lights went on, and the orchestra musicians left the stage. Show’s over, right? But then Nathaniel Gumbs started playing Price’s Organ Suite No. 1. People in the audience who had started filing out paused – and if they were smart, they sat down to relish one final treat.

 

[Image: Composition 10, 1939, Kandinsky]

The rest of April

4/9. Finished Yevgenia Belorusets, “Lucky breaks” (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky). Brief portraits of women from Ukraine’s east. The tone varies from unsparingly acute reportage to droll absurdity. But no whimsey. Hurt, injustice and unease are never the topic, never in the foreground, but never out of sight in the background:

What is this story I am telling really about? Does it make any sense to continue? In fact, the story doesn’t exist, the narrative doesn’t continue, it breaks off. The florist disappeared. The house where she lived was destroyed. Her store was refitted into a warehouse of propaganda materials. Her regular customers left Donetsk long ago. Recently and purely by accident I bumped into one of the people who had often bought flowers from her, and he confessed to having heard something about the florist. He said that she went off into the fields and joined the partisans. That’s exactly what he said: “Went off into the fields.” But on what side her partisan unit was fighting and where those fields were, he had no idea. The florist, he reminded me, never had a nose for politics. She was a flowerworm of sorts; she even classified people into different kinds of flowers. She had never occupied herself with anything in life other than flowers, he lamented. “She must be fighting on the side of the hyacinths,” he suddenly declared, and broke into laughter. We fell silent as he stared at me and waited for me to give his sense of humor its due. “Time is passing, I’m growing smarter; I am beginning to understand which way the wind is blowing and where we’re heading,” he added. “I am not the person I was. You can’t fool me at one try! Kyiv has taught me a thing or two. This isn’t our naive Donetsk. But I still have my sense of humor; I don’t have to sift through my pockets for it.” And again he broke into laughter and then walked off with a triumphant gait, following his own business.

4/29. Heard Thomas Adès’ “Dante symphony” at Disney Hall.

Three summers ago I heard “Inferno” on the radio and then saw it performed with the Royal Ballet. Intensely disliked it. But this was different. I liked the “Inferno” more as an orchestral piece, without dancing. I liked watching the seven percussionists handling their beautiful instruments and making odd sounds – clappers, a giant freestanding drum skin in a frame. Also the bizarre sounds everybody else – double basses, contrabass clarinet, strings, tubas – was making. It was fun trying to figure out where a sound was coming from.

As an orchestral piece, it was possible to forget about the “Divine comedy” aspect entirely, and take it as a series of 13 colorful, varied tableaux.

I did not detect the voice of a prophet confronting us with the emptiness of our lives and our reprehensible sinfulness.

The mood was satirically grotesque rather than prophetic. Themes would start in an affirmative mode – jubilant, merry, serene, grand, tender – but would warp as they went on. Straightforward themes would merge and decay into polyphonic noise (Ligeti, Foss). The default mode was wrong-note neoclassicism (Prokofiev, Shostakovich), but also episodes of wrenching conflict (Ives, polyrhythm, conflicting tempi). Plus Adès integrates his basically tuneful, comprehensible material with free use of all the noisy, disruptive techniques of 20^th century modernism (shrieking glissandi à la Xenakis, a bit more Ligeti).

Episode 12, “The Thieves – devoured by reptiles” is the high point. A boisterous romp by Offenbach distorted into a nightmare. Tremendous applause. But there’s one more section – “Satan – in a lake of ice” – that’s quiet and eerie.

The U.S. premieres were of the two other sections, “Purgatorio” and “Paradisio” (premiered in London, October 2021).

I immediately loved “Puragatorio” without any qualifications. The eerie, gripping recorded voice of a Khazan (cantor) singing a Baqashot prayer. The slightly tinny recording contrasting with the hyper-vivid droning of the double-basses and the bassoon.

“Paradiso” ended spectacularly – the ear-shattering kettle drum crescendo! – but the slow and steady revolving cycles went on past the stage of being mesmerizing to sleep-inducing.

Huge enthusiastic ovation for Adès, Dudamel and the orchestra.

Image: Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with St. John on Patmos, 1640

Fidelio @ Disney Hall, with Deaf West Theatre

 

 

Still digesting the “Fidelio” I saw on Good Friday. The first opera - and first Beethoven - I ever cared for.

 

It’s seems more relevant now than ever. Will there come a time when audiences will not thrill to the scene of a tyrant collapsing because honorable people have the courage to stand up and say, “Enough”?

 

The singers and orchestra were superb. The music was bold, bright and clear. The first act quartet, Leonora’s solo, the chorus of prisoners, Florestan’s solo were magnificent, piercing.

 

The production in effect gave each of the principal parts to two performers – a singer and an actor signing in American Sign Language. They generally – but not always – kept close to each other. The singers tended to wear mostly white, abstract multi-part robes, in contrast to the signing actors, who wore interpretations of 18^th century costumes in colorful textiles. The actors signed and mimed as their counterparts sang. The spoken dialogue interludes were done entirely in sign, in silence. The signing chorus sat in the seats on both sides of the stage, with the white-robed Coro de Manos Blancas signing their words on stage.

 

The first few minutes were confusing. There was a lot going on: the orchestra, the singers, the signing, the supertitles projected above the stage, German, English, ASL. But all you had to do - all you wanted to do - was focus on the actors. You didn’t need to look at the singers – you could hear them loud and clear – and the signing and miming were articulate, even for illiterates like me. A glance every not and then at the supertitles sufficed.

 

The Leonore soprano Christiane Libor was tremendous. She filled the hall without harshness.

 

Russell Harvard, the signing Rocco, was so amusing he almost derailed the show. Likewise Gregor Lopez (Jaquino). I had forgotten that the work begins in a comic mode. But the comedy quickly turns sour, as soon as you realize that Fidelio (Leonora) is deceiving and manipulating all these amusing comic characters.

 

I wish I knew more about signing. It seemed to unfold in a broad, expressive and highly choreographed manner. Is this the signing equivalent of an aria? The actors did seem to be doing the repetitions of phrases that are a feature of the music. Also the ensemble pieces, when each of the principal is singing different words and projecting a different mood – they seemed to be presenting the conflict with vivid clarity.

 

The signing provided a solution to the problem of the spoken dialogue. Should it be done in German or English? Both are jarring. Here, it was done in beautiful gestures.

 

The doubling of the characters grew in significance as the piece unfolded. It’s a story of disguise and deception. Characters are divided. Characters also grow and change. It was electrifying to see this embodied on stage.

 

But what was the effect for the deaf audience? There were signing people all over the theater – probably a lot of first time visitors to Disney Hall. Without the music, I would suspect the story would seem absurdly repetitious and slow-moving. But there was a wild acclamation at the end, with the deaf audience members waving their wide-open palms in the air – the deaf “applause” sign.

Sparks at Disney Hall

 

February 8. First rock concert in four years and it was a blast. Never seen dancing in the aisles like that at Disney Hall. The classical music venue was an appropriate frame for 73-year-old Russell Mael’s voice, negotiating the tricky falsetto, voices and hairpin turns as if he was 23. Two hours without a break and no strain or roughness.

It was a 50^th anniversary concert. Fifty years since their first album. It was also a hometown celebration. Many in the audience seemed fans from 1972. There were also many whose parents hadn't been born then, and discovered the band in last year's terrific documentary. At the end, Russell and Ron paused a long time on the stage, savoring the roar of adulation and love.

Launching the centennial

 

9/30/18. CicLAvia in the morning. Starting from Koreatown – after extensive tire-inflating and cobweb dusting – we headed up Western to Melrose, and up Vine. Then back down Melrose to Wilshire & Western, as far as H.M.S. Bounty. Glorious bright, sunny, warm with a breeze. The novelty of actually seeing buildings and businesses that have been driven past for three decades.

 

 

The Bowl in the evening. Grabbed chips and To Go food and just made it to our seats with the 18,000 other lottery winners. There were also a million people on stage: all the YOLA kids were there sitting with their mentors.

 

After which it unfolded as an extremely miscellaneous concert. Kali Uchis provided an interesting retro-30s bombshell style. Herbie Hancock provided a gigantic jam on “Rockit,” perhaps the best music of the evening.

 

Katy Perry provided a tribute to CicLAvia: Queen’s “Bicycle”! Then she sang “Firework” as an amazing firework illuminated the sky. Who is she?

 

A surprise at the end: John Williams, conducting the intro to “Star Wars”.

 

The “visual experience” by Xitelabs animated the arch of the shell, the speakers, the sides of the stage, etc. with lines, patterns and colors. It was colorful and fun, appropriate for the festive occasion. It probably helped people tolerate the Paul Desenne premiere, which was a bit too acidic for a celebration.

 

The “Firebird” visuals provided prismatic chiaroscuro constructivism that was genial, but with Stravinsky’s music, who needs it? As visual accompaniment it wasn’t quite up to choreography by Balanchine.

 

And that Appix app …. First of all, it seems a funny moment to ask people to download an app that will take control of their phone. Second, the flashing light effect it created was only visible if you turned your back to the stage: is that what the performers want?

 

 

10/2/2018. Refik Anadol’s “WDCH Dreams”. There were absolutely breathtaking moments. At times Disney Hall disappeared, which is really something. It wasn’t an installation, but a movie, projected on the building, with each piece of the façade acting as a separate screen. I thought you would experience it by walking around the building. No: if you got too close you just cast a shadow, spoiling the effect.

 

10/4/2018. LA Phil’s 100^th season kick-off concert was broadcast live on KUSC. The big event was a premiere of Andrew Norman’s “Sustain”, in which arpeggios unfurled with deep-sea-like slowness and grace.

 

Tuesday, 10/9/18. “L.A.’s Newest Music” started in the garden, with Ellen Reid’s “Oscillations: One Hundred Years and Forever” in the Keck Amphitheatre: a choir and soloists cooing, ah-ing, and sighing in shimmering, shifting harmonies.

 

Carolyn Chen’s “The Sleeper and the Drinker” seems to have been the official Big Event, with Dudamel himself conducting. But the the work that has stuck with me was Natacha Diels’ “Laughing to Forget”, featuring tightly choreographed nervous ticks (Face right! Face left! Sway!), odd exhortations (“We’re here!” “Consolations of beauty”), and, joking aside, the richest, liveliest instrumental music of the evening.

Schubert 2 Mahler 1 @ Disney Hall

 

 

It seemed a bit peculiar for Disney Hall to program Songs of the Death of Children on Mother’s Day weekend. But even more consequential was presenting Mahler’s piece between Schubert’s 3^rd and 4^th symphonies.

 

Schubert’s sanity and emotional equilibrium made Mahler seem morbidly attention-seeking.

 

This wasn’t what I was expecting at all.

 

It wasn’t the performance itself—Dudamel extracted the maximum loveliness out of Kindertotenlieder, and Matthias Goerne sang as if he were alone in his room, and we were spying on his private grieving. The first song, "Now the sun wants to rise as brightly," was heart-stoppingly beautiful, but as the piece progressed, the pathos became unbearable. Not painful but indecent.

 

I discovered Mahler as a teenager—the right time to catch the bug—and have been a committed fan ever since. Mahler has always seemed so familiar and Schubert a bit alien.

 

Not this night. Schubert’s 3^rd was a fizzy cocktail of Haydn and Rossini, and in the smashing finale of the 4^th, Dudamel drove the Phil headlong. The violinists all shook their weary arms after it was over and the audience cheered.

Fifths of Beethoven & Shostakovich @ Disney Hall

 

When the concert ended I said, “We are so lucky to have such an amazing orchestra in town!” Jaap van Zweden, the soon-to-be music director of the New York Philharmonic conducted, and he and the LA Phil really sang.

 

Beethoven’s Fifth unspools from the clearly defined cell. It’s almost minimalism. But it’s the opposite of pattern-making: there’s an urgency to it. The stately second movement is like a diagram of grandeur—there’s the pomp, but it is ordered to symmetries beyond any specific occasion.

 

Then came the contrast of the Shostakovich Fifth, in which nothing is clear. Is it earnest? Is it ironic? There are moments of jubilant ruckus, and moments when the ruckus seems presented as a nightmare. He follows his moods where they take him—an assertion of individuality that seems heroic as Beethoven’s.

 

It was a funny evening, with the hall packed with visiting high-school band members from across the nation. And then four days later came the bombshell that JvZ was taking Deborah Borda back with him to NYC!

Mozart, Schoenberg, Steve Reich @ Disney Hall

 

L.A. Phil demonstrated a range of unflashy, ardent virtuosities over the last two weeks of January.

First the All-Reich celebration on the 17^th. I needed this. Even better, the Mallet Quartet (2009) might be Reich’s most cheerful work. There is just enough dryness, relentlessness and repetition to retain credibility. But it’s also more in touch with pop traditions, from do-wop on. The ending is ecstatic.

The newest item on the program, Pulse (2015) doesn’t care about credibility at all. It’s not only pop, but light pop, a Reichian version of Michel Legrand’s Umbrellas of Cherborg.

In Tehillim (1981), the Synergy Vocals female quartet of singers was beyond praise. Precise, warm, animated, incisive. I can’t imagine a better performance. And what music! The best vocalists-plus-ensemble music since Mahler.

Then on the 28^th there was a matinee with Emanuel Ax. Ax’s amiable stage presence dispels every hint of drama. His art hides his art. He makes so little show of his performance, he tricks you into thinking its no big deal. But it’s an enormous deal.

For instance, I can’t imagine a better presentation of Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto (1942). His command of the music is absolute. He was on top of all of the various moods: angst, festivity, ferocity, bemusement, introspection, exclamation. The cadenzas were especially beautiful—the one after the big brass explosion, and the other at the end of the 3^rd movement, before the quick-step 4^th begins. 

For all its serialism, it’s no more challenging than a Richard Strauss tone poem. And a good deal better humored than that. The audience roared its approval.

I can’t help think that AS heard be-bop or at least some progressive jazz. It’s pop as pop as he ever got (after the cabaret songs). It’s also a film score, but instead of an expressionist cinematic nightmare, this time to an atmospheric American noir thriller.

It’s a work of reconciliation. It’s morning. Yawning and looking out at the new day. City not countryside. Irritations, demands, but not torment. Rather sweet. Almost Elmer or Leonard Bernstein. Mid-century blues. You can absolutely imagine Oscar Levant (to whom we owe its conception) playing it.

The concert began with Accompaniment to a Film Scene (1930). Dudamel and the L.A. Phil delineated each gesture, every contrast and transition with nuance and grace. It is breathlessly fast-paced, the moods shifting abruptly from tenderness to terror, pathos to exhilaration. And each passage—or scene—is densely packed with dissonance, polyrhythm, polyphony. There’s a whole epic here. The implied movie is a tumultuous Fritz Lang thriller.

Then Ax did Mozart’s Piano Concerto #14. His Mozart is not a proto-expressionist, but always in keeping. There’s a focus on the whole, rather than the most theatrically effective bits.

The concert ended with Dudamel leading a reduced L.A. Phil in Mozart’s Paris symphony (#31). This was a surprise. I didn’t think Dudamel or the Phil had any special affinity for Mozart. But Ax’s example obviously informed their performance. It avoided obvious show-off stuff, in favor giving the whole work unity. The rhythmic liveliness was especially marked—it danced along—but not too much. It was earnest and warm, but not headlong. Lucid, but not pedantic. More, please!

Haydn creates the world @ Disney Hall

 

The Creation is tricky. I can imagine some people walked out of the performance last Friday thinking Haydn wasn’t up to it. It felt domestic, rather than cosmological. As an 18^th century oratorio, it was neither a transcendental drama (Bach) nor a rousing big noise (Handel). And yet the beginning, The Representation of Chaos, is intensely serious—Beethoven without the posturing. And the barely-audible entrance of the chorus is a theatrical stroke out of Verdi. The whole piece is dramatic: “Let there be light” is a fortissimo blast. The fishes appeared with meandering melodic lines. The elephants appeared with a trombone fart. And so on. The soloists were celebratory, not introspective. It’s humane joy.

 

The only problem last Friday was Alberto Arvelo’s video accompaniment. Yet another video light show. It’s just insulting that LA Phil continues pushing them on us. If anybody really wants to look at Googled images of fish crawl over the interior of Disney Hall instead of listening to Haydn, the Phil should be working to educate them. And if you have to do a video (though I can't imagine why) this is Hollywood, for crying out loud: there are several generations of video artists, not to mention the folks in the entertainment industry who know how to do these things. Enough!

Pacifica Quartet @ Schoenberg Hall, UCLA

 

I think it might have actually helped to not be in the Clark Library’s fantastical neo-baroque music room, but rather a dumpy heavily-used classroom in Schoenberg Hall last Sunday. The leaks from the rain (rain?!) chased us out of the scheduled recital hall.

 

The Pacifica wasn’t fussed. If anything, their Bartók—with a Haydn chaser in-between—was laser-intense.

 

In Bartók's #2, the second movement has a headlong wildness that teeters on the verge of chaos. Then comes a long movement of introspection so absolute it’s neither insouciant nor grave. The Haydn third movement had the same violent slashing tutti chords, but the mood was entirely different: Pulcinello acting up.

 

Both Bartóks ended with heart-stopping quietness—a single note, a phrase cut off. Both went very far out, but found a way home.

 

It good to watch the players watch each other, and sit with an audience listening as intently as the playing.