Mahler Casts a Spell, Bell Lights Up Brahms, Forsythe Sets the Scene, Gheorghiu I.D.’s a Diva

By Donna Perlmutter

Hurray for downtown LA! Where such events as dreams are made of stole into Disney Hall and the Chandler Pavilion. To think this city was once called a cultural wasteland! (while some today dub it “the coolest place.”)

Just look at Disney’s occupants, Gustavo Dudamel and his LA Philharmonic, collaborating with the likes of pianist Yefim Bronfman and violin master Joshua Bell.  

On top of that our resident podium chief gave us the gargantuan Mahler 9^th Symphony, exploding a sense of the composer’s outsized, Technicolor emotional palette.

So, did you think you’d been there before? Well, no one has ever heard too much of Mahler, especially not the 9^th, not those it speaks to -- us, its contemporaries.

And not considering that this 20^th-century composer languished in oblivion many years before Leonard Bernstein finally championed him -- and inspired the world to turn on to music that most easily exemplifies what neurologist Oliver Sacks meant when he said:

“Of all the arts, only music touches directly the emotions that we never could identify before.”

No surprise, then, that  the SRO audiences received this latest performance without a cough, without a whimper, 2200 listeners sitting in pin-drop silence -- even as Dudamel, at the end of its 90-minute marathon, held back applause far beyond the point of the last overtone fading away.

But that didn’t minimize the powerful effect he and the band (including its marvelous soloists) branded on their massed listeners. Which is, in no small part, because Mahler translates feeling states into music -- graphically. Never mind that the Ländler, here, missed its grazioso sweetness to contrast with menacing swagger or that the overall robust attacks blurred some opposing elements. By the time we got to the finale and its death knell of fine, ominous cries and whispers, there was the inevitably profound Mahler spell cloaking the sound scape.

And thoughts turned to Barry Socher, the orchestra’s beloved, long-time first violinist -- he died the night before -- to whom Dudamel dedicated the performance…

A week earlier, another momentous event took place, one that could look on paper like business as usual -- but wasn’t. Joshua Bell? Perhaps the most over-achieving performer around? The Brahms Violin Concerto? Never, ever far from our ears? Well, suffice it to say, this outing with Dudamel and his forces, Bell doing Brahms, made the headline in my mind.

Especially because the violinist’s recording, way back to 1996 with the Cleveland Orchestra and Christoph von Dohnányi, glitters like a multi-faceted diamond. So surely, after playing it hundreds of times since then, he would have lost something. But that was the magic at Disney Hall -- his way with this ever-gorgeous work only gained.

Bell played into the orchestra, as a member of  it, emerging for his solos to find a myriad of colors with dazzlingly nuanced expressive turns on any single note -- supplicating, becalming, passionate -- as Dudamel et al found their pinpoint path with him.

So did they for Yefim Bronfman, returning to the Disney stage for another favorite, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4. And if physical presence means anything then you must take note of this musician’s manner.

A big man, he encompasses the instrument, he encompasses the music; from the moment his fingers touch the keyboard you see he has dominion over it. And he plays the way a king sits down to a feast set before him, with absolute power and relishing every fine tidbit.

That is to say delicacy did not elude Bronfman, reminding us of the axiom to play Beethoven with Chopin in the head and Chopin with Beethoven in mind.  Delicacy and depth, suppleness and strength, all emerged under those virtuosic fingers.

Beyond Disney and across the street, the Music Center’s Chandler Pavilion was the scene of its own major event: the city’s newest resident dance force, William Forsythe, making a debut with three different companies. 

Remember him? Back in 1983 during that brief period when the Joffrey Ballet took up temporary tenancy at the Pavilion, this choreographer made the company a piece that caused tremors throughout the town.

It was “Love Songs,”a prescient dance illustrating irony in its title with lots of domestic thrashing about by its “lovers” -- laying bare a neurotic truth beneath its idealized surfaces.

Well, you can forget most of that. In the decades since, Forsythe has become an international figure, forging an abstract style that subtly suggests all kinds of modes, moods and original partnering relationships that never lose the complexity of choreographic design at its highest level.

Call him the dance-maker who re-enacts neoclassical ballet --everything on pointe, women with bun-sleek hair, all in leotards/tights. Others try and often fail by going through motions, just putting steps together or ugly distortions together. But he’s the real thing.

How do you know? Because moment-to-moment you stay engaged with every movement compendium, every evolution  from the beginning of a phrase, through to its end. There’s an organicity at work, not a mere attachment of one pose to another.

Needless to say all the parts involved -- music, staging, lighting —find that same organic quality. That’s what Forsythe is: an artist. When the curtain rose on “Pas/Parts 2016” the dancers were framed by soft white walls that gave off an illumination of purity, just like the dance itself, animated by its Thom Willems score. Within the movement context there were swirls of behavior inflections -- seductive, arrogant, wistful -- all suggested/reinforced by the music and performed to perfection by the superb San Francisco Ballet.

Tongue-in-cheekiness came with “The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude” to the Allegro from Schubert’s 9^th, as Pacific Northwest Ballet cavorted furiously with constantly grinning faces. And the big number, “Artifact Suite” -- a take-off on grand ballet spectacle with enough contrapuntal and canonic patterns for large corps to make Balanchine’s head spin — was a clever conundrum, danced brilliantly by the Houston Ballet.

But even if a casual audience can’t penetrate the underside of all that Forsythe puts out there, it’s still fascinating.

So was the concert by superstar Angela Gheorghiu, who returned to the Broad Stage, her Santa Monica oasis. If ever there was a magnet for soprano fanciers she is it. And at this visit  she lit up the stage with a Romanian contingent: her countrymen tenor Calin Bratescu and conductor Tiberiu Soare leading a pickup orchestra.

No one yelled “Brava, mi diva” this time, but you can be sure that the wall-to-wall audience worshipped and rewarded its goddess with lusty “Bravas” all around. 

And if you question what is a diva anyway, just know that it is one who delivers everything -- who basks in the knowledge that her every move, every gesture, is being gobbled up by fans fairly salivating at her presence and then sings, as she did again on this night, with a voice that is a liquid column of sound, smooth up and down the scale, with a lustrous top and that signature Gheorghiu legato.

It is truly the sound of velvet caressing the air, gripping listeners in its emotive power as well.

Best of all, among arias and orchestral pieces, was the church-yard scene between Tosca and Mario, this diva portraying an operatic diva who testily toys with her lover, the two of them bringing off their excerpt with tantalizing naturalism. But the whole evening was a gemütlich affair -- warmly eager and energized by Bucharestian spirit.

You can’t do better for an opening fall season than this.

Showcases for Baryshnikov and Von Stade -- Meeting the Measure or Not...

By Donna Perlmutter

So what do starry eminences decide when the time comes to hang it up? Leave the stage? Not Flicka. Not Misha.

For these two, Frederica von Stade and Mikhail Baryshnikov, we must understand just how ingrained the love of performance is -- she, the lyric mezzo with the tender tear in her voice, the Cherubino who trembled with pubescent fervor and tickled us as the tipsy Périchole or melted our hearts with her “Pretty Little Horses”; he, the dancer who leaped in the air with laughing ease, defied gravity, devoured space, aped Jimmy Cagney moves with jaw-dropping accuracy and put his bravura technique to the service of powerful grief as Albrecht.

There’s a reason the world calls them by their nicknames: And it’s not because she was America’s sweetheart soprano or because he acted in “Sex and the City” cameos: They don’t want to give up the stage and we don’t want to let them go.

Take von Stade, for instance. At the Beverly Hills Wallis, which couldn’t be a more inviting space for her in the Ricky Ian Gordon/Leonard Foglia one-act opera “Coffin in Egypt,” the still-alluring star exuded the same genuineness she’s known for. True, the white-haired-matron role adds too many years to an appearance that is otherwise much younger. And her jaunty spirit has been compromised by the requirements of this character -- an old lady looking back on her life with recriminations, regrets and grievances galore.

As such she also had to embrace the vintage vanity of upper-class southern whites, with typically racist references abounding as well as pre-feminist notions of women as second-class citizens -- none of which is too appetizing.

But if only the material had not been so hackneyed. And if Gordon had found some better musical means for the character to express the great dissatisfaction with her life at 90, waiting to die in a miserable Texas town named Egypt. And if Foglia had not resorted to so much repetition in his text, taken from a Horton Foote play.

Luckily, there was some respite from the ungrateful vocal writing -- high and shrieky -- with moments when von Stade could seize on a melodic wisp remindful of “Oklahoma” (“Oh, What a Beautiful Morning”) or when she could wax softly nostalgic or be vocally resplendent in red. Losing the amplification installed at the Houston premiere, and here, would have helped considerably, also with the gospel chorus. Others in the cast had well-enacted speaking parts only and conductor Kathleen Kelly led the nine-member chamber ensemble ably.

But the pickings were better for Baryshnikov, what with two of Chekhov’s stories within grasp. And although “Man in a Case,” his third outing at the Broad Stage,  was another instance of the star’s cart before the horse -- the producers made a hash out of the Russian writer’s first tale, “Case” -- Misha finally gained the upper hand in the second and shorter one, “About Love.”

Here he was at his affecting best: a man in love with a married woman as she suffers a severe depression because of their prohibited union. When he describes kissing her face and arms and hands that are wet with the taste of tears, his voice is deep and burnished, his Latvian-tinged speech earthy. It is Misha, the actor he could ideally be, never better revealed than at this moment.

But “Case’s” depiction bore all the signs of unresolved trial and error -- despite the big-name team he surrounded himself with, one that gladly produced this pastiche for the still-luminous luminary. (After all, would there be a draw with a lesser name?)

The set was plain and simple, especially compared to his previous artfully sophisticated ventures at the Broad. As the lead character, Belikov, at first he seemed like a displaced person with a thick Russian accent trying to tell an ol’ boy story in the American vernacular to macho jokesters. It definitely misfires -- -- no matter the add-ons of projections and screens, or the Ukrainian folk dancers and musicians/singers as part of the story, or his signature fillip of a few r&b steps.

As the incoherent format changes, our hero appears in a long black coat, dramatic and stylish, again as he was “In Paris” -- the outsider, the stoic loner beset with proprietary concerns. But the patched-together show did not jell. Too much false construction.

For an object lesson in artistry we had only to see Peter Brook’s touring production of “The Suit” at UCLA. Unburdened with having to make a star vehicle, the 89-year-old theatrical wizard put together a marvelous realization of a South African story that reached poetic heights -- in speech, symbolism, music, stagecraft -- all of which had integral meaning, carried along by superb actor/musicians in tidbits from meticulously chosen Miriam Makeba to Schubert to Billie Holiday. Count yourself unlucky if you missed it.

But if you chugged downtown to a weekend of the Paul Taylor Dance Company there was predictable excellence. And the choreographer’s signal motifs found their way to such golden oldies as “Airs,” his Baroque ode to Handel, with its piety and joy intact, followed by two newer pieces.

In all three we could see his single, slyly humorous i.d. tag -- you know, the “shazam” arms, those sudden angular bolts of lightning in vintage comic books that are akin to the Nina letters in Al Hirschfeld cartoons. They last only nanoseconds and are unmistakably a Taylor emblem.

Otherwise, he gave us “Banquet of Vultures,” a brilliantly organized complex of society’s vanquishment by a dictator set to dark Morton Feldman music and its delightfully frivolous antidote, “Gossamer Gallants,” which makes the inescapable point that sexual politics animates even winged creatures: females flirt and seduce, males gape and grasp, only to be ensnared and browbeaten.

Also downtown, at Disney Hall, and everywhere around the city, we had the Minimalist Jukebox celebration, a humongous event. One heart-wrenching entry was David Lang’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Little Match Girl Passion,” performed by the LA Master Chorale under Grant Gershon.

There’s a reason this work is universally beloved. It deals in barest simplicity, but the Hans Christian Andersen parable of a child’s suffering -- as a beggar hungering in the frigid outdoors,  to hallucinating of sumptuous suppers and longed-for grandmothers, to death -- is shot through with stark emotion.

Lang’s “Passion,” with Gershon and singers as his champion, emerged with a plaintive gorgeousness, its pathos rising from fugal lines sung in clipped phrases that spoke of icy deprivation -- only at the end of which came relief.

Quite a month it was…

The Wallis Opens with Graham, Verdi Blows Out Candles

By Donna Perlmutter

An illustrious  opening of a Beverly Hills performing arts complex, the Annenberg Wallis. A nod to cultural icon Martha Graham. Also to Giuseppe Verdi, with his delectable last opera, “Falstaff.” What else could we say but huzzahs all around?

As the Wallis’s first offering, there was the Graham company -- which has not toured L.A. since 2000. Too long.  After all, it was marvelous Martha who put modern dance on the map, starting in the 1930s and defining it as the most exhilaratingly theatrical art form to probe the human psyche.

And surely there could be no better welcome back to this city than a bid to inaugurate the Wallis -- a 500-seat theater set in a landmark: the restored, lavishly marbled Beverly Hills post office, a rendition of Italian Renaissance. She would have loved it. Especially the spacious stage with ample wing space and terrific sight lines afforded by the raked rows of seating.

But with Graham long gone -- she died in ’91, running her company and even appearing onstage right up to the end at 96! -- it’s  good to see that the current dancers are equal to the same stunningly high level as those in today’s top troupes.

What’s more, the bill of fare just seen on the Wallis stage gave its audience a deliciously full spectrum of Graham’s historical importance -- from the Denishawn days of exotica and floating gossamer, on to that period when modern dance wrapped itself around political-moral issues.

The program -- planned and narrated by company stalwart, director Janet Eilber, formerly one of Graham’s major dancers -- made its mark throughout.

Once again we could think of Käthe Kollwitz’s expressionist woodcuts when Katherine Crockett performed “Lamentation,” Graham’s famous 1930 solo --  sitting on a bench and shrouded in silk jersey, her arms and legs twisting and stretching that garment into angled folds of grief, her hollowed out facial features gripped with feeling, speaking the unspeakable.

Similar angst characterized “Chronicle,” an outcry against war, with group dances that were riveting in their sense of defiance and their uniquely austere formations.

But it was “Maple Leaf Rag” -- a cleverly jokey poke at Graham herself, via emblematic quotes from her own movement vocabulary -- that sent the crowd home happy. For some others, though, the grandiloquent and overly glitzy “Ritual to the Sun,” set to Carl Nielsen’s “Helios” Overture, looked like someone’s misbegotten gloss on the choreographer’s signature.

Originality returned the next night, though, with LA Opera’s new production of  “Falstaff,” the Verdian romp that exults in briskly buoyant, multi-part vocal lines and prismatic orchestration so full of fine glitter it fairly lifts off  to the sky.

A connoisseur piece by any measure, it serves to celebrate the composer’s 200^th birthday. What’s more, it turns the tables on those who regard Verdi -- exclusively -- as the emperor of Italian opera’s deep-felt tragedies like “Traviata” and “Rigoletto.”

This one is a comedy. Verdi and his librettist Boito created their Boccaccian delight as an odd little treatise on pre-Renaissance morality (courtesy of the Bard’s “Merry Wives of Windsor” and “Henry IV”). It’s built around a fallen aristocrat with delusions of importance  but with philosophical/psychological underpinnings.

We think back to 1982 when the great god-like maestro Carlo Maria Giulini led the LA Philharmonic in a wholly high-value production with an all-star cast and how, whenever LA Opera revives it, thoughts turn to those performances.

Happily, there were no disappointments or even oddities or directorial revisions this time. And while conductor James Conlon may not have lingered over the lyric heavenliness of its short-lived melodic strains he certainly let them soar and gave great propulsive vitality to the bustling activity captured in the score.

Adrian Linford’s traditional designs made for easy access. And director Lee Blakely kept the stage action lively, possibly losing some of the lesser roles’ character definition.

But the main order of business comes down to Sir John Falstaff, and in his portrayal of the fat knight Roberto Frontali made a superb case. First off, his baritone has a full range of tone and expressive color, and you hear the singing line in all of his musical phrases. He even gave off hints of an Italian Renaissance Zero Mostel as an adorable dumpling dressed to the nines for his courting caper -- although not issuing utmost cranky wisdom in the “honor” monologue.

The other standout was Ronnita Nicole Miller as Mistress Quickly, the schemer who leads him to his comic disaster: a dump in the River Thames. Ekaterina Sadovnikova sang prettily as Nanetta, but without making us forget the alluring voice of Barbara Hendricks (who could?), while Juan Francisco Gatell was a quite wiry-sounding Fenton.

Performances through Dec. 1 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Disney Stages a Surprise and 3rd Time's the Charm for "Carmen"

by Donna Perlmutter

Defying all odds, Disney Hall celebrated its 10^th anniversary without so much as one official standing on stage to bestow thanks to long lists of benefactors or indulge in blandishments and platitudes.

Yes, Gustavo Dudamel fronted his LA Philharmonic and welcomed the capacity crowd to Disney. “A miracle,” he called it, that single word summing up the concert venue’s brilliant acoustic and architectural wonder.

But this was no ordinary birthday gala. It was wholly a tribute event to Frank Gehry, the man who patiently took his lumps over the years, yet managed -- through controversy, dispute and economic sputtering -- to create the citadel atop the hill at First and Grand that visitors from around the world flock to see.

The surprise factor turned out to be the architect’s persona in the hall -- via his voice heard on audio. What a homey and folksy voice it was, uttering the private words, almost comic and sometimes self-mocking à la Jules Feiffer, explaining how his designs came into being, how they doodled onto a page, only to get crossed out and tossed, over and over again before reaching a final draft.

And at evening’s end Gehry was brought onstage, in suit and tie, no fancy-dan tux  -- even then without a trace of starchy pomp or self-importance, only a few humble, half-embarrassed bows but mostly gestures to the players and their maestro, amid a mylar confetti drop.

The main revelry, though, came with the music, a smartly programmed hour that showed off the orchestra in sterling form. True, there were intrusive screens everywhere, a Hollywood Bowl leftover.  (Even before entering the hall Gehry’s more philosophic quotes were projected onto walls of corridors and lobbies, portending something scarily ex-cathedra-like).

But if you were lucky enough to sit in a side section -- for this time only -- it was possible to look directly onto the stage and avoid seeing the screens. That way you could hear the music without the sensory distraction of unrelated visuals (a montage of  other occasions, other conductors). And when that music is so compelling do you really want a non sequitur smack in your face?

No such disturbance entered the scene when Yo-Yo Ma, everyone’s favorite guest-star cellist these days, was on hand -- granting Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme his utter refinement, elegance and poise in gorgeous balance with the band, expertly managed by its chief.

In fact, the orchestra played everything superbly, back again in its rightful residence. And that included Adès’s “These Premises Are Alarmed,” a gloriously wild thing that lives up to its title and generated the players’ bracing, clarion excitement.

Dudamel also took a bracing tack with the Rondo Burleske from Mahler’s 9^th Symphony -- which he powered in with ultra-fast fury. His way with the organ movement of Saint-Saëns’s 3^rd Symphony required some ear-stuffing, for those protecting their hearing, but he and his cohorts ended on a sentimental note, with a tenderly lush, glittering “When You Wish Upon a Star,” honoring the Hollywood icon and the hall’s namesake, pictured onscreen.

Across the street at the Music Center Pavilion honors also came to LA Opera, by way of Bizet’s “Carmen” -- with the same production it borrowed from Madrid and mounted here twice before. But this time, thanks to Trevore Ross directing a wholly alive cast, every moment on stage counted.  And with Plácido Domingo’s masterly guidance of the pit orchestra,  issuing the score’s delicious sweetness and ardor, all kinds of narrative business also became illuminated.

Carmen, for instance, left alone in the smuggler’s camp to brood over her distressful love triangle, brought the third act to a climactic close, angrily flicking her cigarette in a cadential flourish with the last bold chord.

Otherwise, Irish mezzo soprano Patricia Bardon -- vocally sound if not lustrous -- made only a somewhat convincing Gypsy hellion in the title role and was more of a tough cookie than a sensual dynamo.

But Brandon Jovanovich, with a gradual warm-up to the naïve soldier’s  ultimately obsessional, manic despair, gave a performance worthy of an Oscar.  It was his and the defiant Carmen’s own human bull fight -- she, testing the limits of life and love; he, determined to possess her -- that took place outside the arena. With each rigid, tense step he stalked her as in a dance of death. His murderous finale was more gripping than that of any Don José I’ve ever seen -- a rarity in opera because singing, by itself, takes utmost focus. And his darkly resonant tenor did not disappoint.

Other cast members kept up the high standard. Ildebrando D’Arcangelo was a wonderfully animated and agile Escamillo, not the stolid mannequin usually trotted out to sing the “Toreador Song.”  (Both he and Jovanovich sang for the company before in productions that had, seemingly, absentee directors. Redemption at last, on a grand scale...)

First timers in this “Carmen” were South African soprano Pretty Yende, a Micaëla of silvery tone and gratifyingly natural demeanor as the Madonna interest, and Valentin Anikin, a corrupt Zuniga whose basso sounded as though it got swallowed in a cavern.

But the whole enterprise was absorbing. Set designer Gerardo Trotti’s sun-drenched first act boasted a lovely, long perspective of a palm-tree-lined Seville street, and men in Jesús del Pozo’s  summery pastels wearing borsalinos and berets.

Granted, there was no gritty realism here, no graffiti-scrawlings on walls as depicted in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s landmark production, nor any attempt at a Peter Brooks deconstruction. But Bizet in his own Opéra Comique style, carried out with this degree of attention, is irrefutably captivating.