Music review: Morton Subotnick, California E.A.R. Unit at REDCAT

A beautiful retro-futurist atmosphere hovered over REDCAT on Saturday night as iconic electronic music composer-performer Morton Subotnick’s seminal “Silver Apples of the Moon” and “A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur” were brought vividly to life, here and now, with tools spanning the ages. 

Subotnick, the conceptualist and conjurer at the center, manned his laptop and Buchla200e synthesizer as the intrepid California E.A.R. Unit lent its piano/violin/percussion forces in a guided improvisational tour de force.

Subotnick’s original 1966 recording of “Silver Apples,” commissioned by Nonesuch Records, is a veritable “greatest hit” of electronic music history, appealing to an uncommonly wide public. It broke the esoteric mold of electronic music, an artistic landmark nonetheless accessible in its rippling rhythmic pulses and harmonic shimmer. “A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur,” from 1977, was made with the same mix of Buchla synths and tape recorders. In short, claims of his being the “godfather of techno” are more than idle hype.

Subotnick and the E.A.R. Unit are allies with a layered history. They have previously collaborated and share an academic-experimental common ground at the California Institute of the Arts -- of which Subotnick was a founding faculty member. It is now a home base for current Unit members pianist Vicki Ray, violinist Eric KM Clark and percussionist Amy Knoles (here equipped with an extended “drum kit,” including jumbo bass drum and bodhran).

Music review: Pacific Symphony celebrates Iranian New Year

The Pacific Symphony was, Thursday night, the pacific Symphony, an orchestra serving the cause for peace.

The circumstance was the opening at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall of the orchestra’s 11th annual American Composers Festival. This year’s focus was Persian, partly in recognition of the large Iranian American community in Orange County.

The theme was innocuous on the surface, a celebration of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, which begins the first day of spring. It’s an occasion for Iranians of all religions and ethnicities to come together. On Nowruz, people who stopped talking to each other are encouraged to try again.

We don’t, however, live in an innocuous world, and the festival’s news was the premiere of Richard Danielpour’s portentous 51-minute “Toward a Season of Peace.” It got a unanimous standing ovation. Political observers overlook classical concerts as useful litmus tests for popular sentiment toward war and peace. But given the current Iranian situation and Orange County’s reputation for championing conservative causes, this instance perhaps merits noting.

Music review: Emanuel Ax recital at Soka Performing Arts Center

In his recital at the Soka Performing Arts Center in Aliso Viejo on Sunday, pianist Emanuel Ax shared the spotlight with two exceptional instruments. Ax played a bright-sounding Hamburg Steinway in the first half and a more darkly textured New York Steinway in the second.

This was the first piano recital at the 1,032-seat hall, which opened in September. The detail and depth of sonic warmth produced by Ax in a program of variations by Copland, Haydn, Beethoven and Schumann was embraced by the venue, which compares favorably to Walt Disney Concert Hall. Yasuhisa Toyota was the acoustician for both spaces.

There was an especially effective crystalline clarity to Ax’s sound in Copland’s compact and dramatic Piano Variations. Copland called his austere 1930 masterpiece a “ten-minute monster,” and it shows the composer in an atypically rigorous modernist mode. In Ax’s hands, the score’s bracing dissonance and loud chords became beautiful.

In Haydn’s touching Andante and Variations in F minor, the pianist made a case for the composer as the first great Romantic. In a rendition full of feeling, he meticulously etched the alternating variations on two themes, leading to a whispering coda.

Ax tested the resounding lower register of the Hamburg instrument in Beethoven’s “Eroica” Variations and Fugue, Opus 35. He captured the grotesquery in the opening bass chords, a self-parody of the composer’s own theme from his “Eroica” Symphony finale. Ax’s account was exhilaratingly earthy and visceral.

Even better was Ax’s uninhibited rendition of Schumann’s inspired “Symphonic Etudes.” If any single work could test the grand orchestral and intimate properties of a New York Steinway and a new concert hall, it's this one. Ax conveyed Schumann’s full range of moods, from dreamy and reflective to impetuous and passionate. His encore was an atmospheric rendering of “Pagodes” from Debussy’s “Estampes.”

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Music review: Spectral Scriabin

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-- Rick Schultz

Photo: Emanuel Ax performs Sunday at the Soka Performing Arts Center. Credit: Eric Mitsuo Kimura

 

Music review: Spectral Scriabin

“Spectral Scriabin” at the Broad Stage on Saturday night looked  promising, with look, indeed, part of the promise. Eteri Andjaparidze -- a pianist from the Georgian republic with a cult following and now a respected educator in America -- teamed up with extraordinary lighting designer Jennifer Tipton to illuminate a fascinating Russian composer who heard in colors.

Created for the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan and also presented at Lincoln Center’s 2011 White Light Festival, “Spectral Scriabin” came highly regarded, at least according to its press clippings. Maybe something in Andjaparidze’s brittle and sometimes banal playing or Tipton’s overly subtle gauzy projections got lost in the translation, or in the cross-country transport. But there is more than one way to look at Scriabin.

Born in 1872, Aleksandr Scriabin was a late Romantic who turned Modernist and then turned mystic and died young in 1915. As a musical revolutionary, Scriabin helped move music forward, influencing Stravinsky and Schoenberg and even Henry Cowell’s eclectic California school.

A decade after Scriabin’s death, at the fashionable salons in Paris, London, New York, Chicago and L.A. -- where Duchamp was debated and banned copies of Joyce’s “Ulysses” were circulated -- Scriabin’s music was often played and his mystic chord  mooned over by Madame Blavatsky's Theosophists. The young Elliott Carter and John Cage were Scriabinites. Pierre Boulez has become one in his later years.

But what Scriabin is mostly remembered for today, unfortunately, is his synesthesia (he associated tones with colors) and his mystical over-the-topness. He wrote that he wanted to suspend bells from the clouds over India in his last orchestral work, the incomplete “Mysterium.”

Andjaparidze put together an uninspired program consisting mainly of preludes, etudes, poems and small character pieces. She did begin with the rhythmically advanced, late “Vers la Flamme,” and end with the Fourth Sonata, Scriabin’s first spiritual masterpiece. The pieces ran, one into another, for an hour and were played with the audience in the dark, so that Tipton could colorize the backdrop. 

Tipton’s lighting effects at the very start of Saturday’s recital were splendid. As Andjaparidze began the spooky opening of “Vers la Flamme” in as much darkness as the fire officials allowed (exit signs remained illuminated), her hands were bathed in a ghostly glow. Then the music stand on her piano began to glow. But there was little spookiness to the rushed and squarely phrased playing.

There were, however, sparks. Andjaparidze has fingers of steel and she gets an impressively metallic sound from the keyboard with her sharp attacks. She favors momentum over wistfulness. Early preludes and etudes were treated as showpieces. The Waltz in A-Flat was dizzying. The Poem Languide in B Major was also dizzying.

Tipton’s lighting effects relied on large discs of pastels projected onto to the scrim. Occasionally, but only occasionally, a strong red or blue created a mood. It could be that I was sitting too close to the stage for the pastels to take; it could be that the show was created for a smaller space; or it could be that too much extraneous exit sign light bled onto the stage. But the lighting ultimately put attention on the pianist herself, rather than on illuminating the music.

Now and then, Andjaparidze surprised me. The Andante opening of the Fourth Sonata, which ended the program, was beautifully spare; every note, in this instance, actually glowing. That didn't last. The fast second movement became yet another showpiece, although it did allow Tipton her one great moment. At the climax, the backdrop became a blaze of white light, in a Robert Wilson way (Tipton has worked extensively with Wilson).

As I write this, the L.A. Marathon is being run under my window, and my street has been turned into a big advertisement for Honda. The theme is “The Power of Dreams,” even though dreams are in short supply. What dreams are there in helicopters hovering overhead and an atrociously bad rock band the city has set up to egg on (or bum out) miraculous runners?

The power of dreams is their otherworldliness, a runner's high. Scriabin’s music cannily catches this dream state. Andjaparidze’s Scriabin was closer to a big race to a blazing finish.

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Photo: Eteri Andjaparidze performs "Spectral Scriabin" at the Broad Stage on Saturday night. Credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times. 

Music review: John Adams' 'Absolute Jest' in San Francisco

When John Adams was a young composer and conductor in San Francisco in the early ’70s, he would often perform the experimental music of John Cage and other radicals, which was the hip thing to do at the time. But he has said that all that avant-garde business could leave him musically dissatisfied, and he’d go home and put on recordings of late Beethoven string quartets.

That is essentially what he does in a provocative new orchestral piece -- an Adams-ized mélange of late Beethoven -- commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony as part of music director Michael Tilson Thomas’ American Mavericks festival here.

The premiere at Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday night was sandwiched between just such radical ’70s pieces as Cage’s anarchic “Song Books” Wednesday and Feldman’s opaque Piano and Orchestra, which followed Adams on Thursday’s program.

So is Adams merely reliving his youth, or is he perhaps a maverick’s maverick, rebelling against the festival’s prevalent progressive spirit? The wise-guy title of the new piece is “Absolute Jest.” And it’s a great entertainment, as long as you don’t think too hard about it. 

Music review: Neeme Jarvi, Ralph Kirshbaum and L.A. Phil at Disney Hall

This post has been corrected, as indicated below.

There are two interlocking storylines at Walt Disney Concert Hall this weekend: the culmination of the Piatigorsky International Cello Festival, and the belated return of Estonian-born maestro and patriarch of a conducting dynasty, Neeme Järvi.  

A prolific recording conductor, to say the least -- you name it and it’s probably in Järvi’s discography somewhere -- and once a frequent visitor here, it seems that Järvi hasn’t led the Los Angeles Philharmonic since a 1990 Hollywood Bowl date, and hasn’t conducted the Phil downtown since 1989.  So the orchestra is taking advantage of Järvi’s versatility in a most unusual and festive way: He is accompanying three different cellists, one per concert, in five different pieces.

The first cellist out of the gate Thursday night was Ralph Kirshbaum, tackling the signature cello concerto of the repertoire, that of Dvorák.  Deadly routine can set in with a piece played as often as this, but Kirshbaum gave it an extra push -- not always precisely in tune yet full of gutsy expression and, particularly toward the end, drawing us in with varying tone colors. 

Next up: Mischa Maisky on Saturday and Alisa Weilerstein on Sunday.

Järvi -- now 74 and, as ever, a master of economical, telling gestures -- opened the concert with a Dvorák “Carnival” Overture whose outer sections ripped and roared as much as you might want, delivered with bracing clarity by the Philharmonic. 

The main orchestral course was Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.  Järvi, wouldn’t you know it, has recorded all 15 symphonies, if somewhat unevenly, but the Fifth was one of his best recordings in that cycle. Thursday’s performance more-or-less confirmed Järvi’s sane way with the Fifth -- tempos right down the middle, the argument unfolding logically with textural clarity, missing just the last ounce of intensity.  Also, Järvi’s treatment of the Finale’s controversial coda has brightened a bit, no longer quite as slow and beaten-down.

[For the record, 2:40 p.m., March 16: An earlier version of this story said that Järvi hadn't conducted the L.A. Philharmonic since 1994. His last appearance with the orchestra was in 1990.]

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 Los Angeles Philharmonic with Neeme Järvi; Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A.; 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday; $57-$180; (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.org.

Photos: Top left: Neeme Järvi. Credit: Frederick Stucker. Top right: Ralph Kirshbaum. Credit: Henry Fair.

Music review: San Francisco Symphony's John Cage 'Song Books'

The San Francisco Symphony is 100. Michael Tilson Thomas, who first conducted the orchestra 36 years ago, is in his 16th season as music director, and he has done more to give it a national profile than anyone else. But the anniversary that perhaps means the most for the San Francisco's unique brand is the 12th of Tilson Thomas’ American Mavericks festival.

A Mavericks celebration is going on here at Davies Symphony Hall with a two-week festival (that will also tour the Midwest and New York) and the remarkable thing about it is that -- in no small part due to Tilson Thomas’ powers of persuasion that get unlikely stars to perform unlikely music -- outlier composers don’t seem quite so mavericky anymore.

Wednesday night's program began with a half-hour staging of excerpts from John Cage’s anarchy-centric “Song Books.” The singers were Joan La Barbara, Meredith Monk and Jessye Norman. Yes, that Jessye Norman, the regal opera star. She was magnificent. They all were.

Music review: Piatigorsky Cello Festival opening concert at USC

The Piatigorsky International Cello Festival began big Friday night at USC’s Bovard Auditorium. Seven cello soloists played five concertos (two were double concertos) in an exhausting and often spectacular showcase concert. And it was just the start of what promises to be an inimitable 10-day nonstop cello orgy that will end March 18 at Walt Disney Concert Hall with a piece by Christopher Rouse for 100 cellists.

But, hey, USC has the reputation for knowing how to party, and I overheard one student cellist in the audience say she was prepared to become cello-ed out.

Cellists have come from all continents except Antarctica, Ralph Kirshbaum, the festival’s artistic director, noted in his introductory remarks at Bovard. That includes 22 soloists and 45 young cellists who will participate in public master classes. It also means a bonanza for the airlines, since cellists must buy an extra seat for their fragile instruments.

Music review: Mezzo-soprano Laurie Rubin at AT&T Center Theatre

A young mezzo-soprano whose voice is darkly complex and mysteriously soulful and who adds intense emphasis to every word of text sang six songs by the Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo on Thursday night at the AT&T Center Theatre. In one, a bee bites the lip of a sleeping shepherdess as if it were a rose, to the envy of a shy lover.

Laurie Rubin's rich, toffee-thick tones conveyed not just the sense of touch of puffy rosy lips but also their exceptional redness.

It would hardly occur to a listener that Rodrigo had been blind. Nor might someone hearing Rubin’s new recording of the Rodrigo songs, say on the radio, suspect the mezzo is without sight. In recital, of course, that is obvious. Whether this makes her a different sort of singer than one who sees was the question posed by this short recital and equally short colloquium, which was organized by the noted USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and presented by the university at the theater inside the AT&T Center highrise in downtown L.A.

Music review: Jeffrey Kahane recital at Walt Disney Concert Hall

Pianist-conductor Jeffrey Kahane’s combination recital and chamber music concert on Wednesday at Walt Disney Concert Hall took a delightful detour when he performed his son Gabriel’s “Django: Tiny Variations on a Big Dog.”

Commissioned by Kahane père in 2008, the score was inspired by the family dog, named after the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Programmed between major works by Bach and Chopin, this rigorously inventive six-minute set of variations remarkably held its own.

Sounding hoarse from hay fever, Kahane told the Disney Hall audience it took him months to learn his son’s breakneck perpetual motion variation, “Mechanized Django.” He dazzlingly conveyed Django’s different moods, including a ragtime section evoking goofy canine charm.

Since becoming music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in 1997, Kahane hasn’t been seen much in recital. But he began his career as a pianist, winning a gold medal at the Arthur Rubinstein competition in 1983. Kahane opened with Bach’s French Suite No. 5 (BWV 816), performed with expressive warmth and fleet-fingered high spirits. His occasional ornamentations gave due consideration to Baroque performance practices without becoming precious, and he crisply articulated the ebullient concluding Gigue.