Playing to Core of the Big Apple

Mark Morris came with, and ran down the aisles for a quick balletic exit with, Isaac Mizrahi. Peter Sellars’ date was Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. Representatives of New York’s operatic, new music and cultural elite had packed the concert hall of the 92nd St. Y on March 20. And when it was over, when soprano Dawn Upshaw had picked herself up off the floor after what was surely the most aerobic performance of a Bach sacred cantata ever, a local critic wisecracked, eyes rolling, that it was all very L.A.

After all, Sellars, who directed the event--part of the popular three-concert series Upshaw curated at the Y called Voices of the Spirit--underlined every emotional implication in one of Bach’s most heart-rending works, the Cantata, BWV 199, “My Heart Swims in Blood,” as graphically and outrageously as if it were a John Woo film.

Then again, the critic may just have had L.A. on the brain. There were, of course, the Academy Awards, which New Yorkers obsess over as much as folks everywhere do, even if they pretend they don’t. There was also the fact that the Oscars had driven the Los Angeles Philharmonic out of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and into Lincoln Center for its second annual New York City residency, which this time made room for an appearance by the orchestra’s New Music Group.

On top of that, there was also a rare appearance by Los Angeles’ other well-known new music group, the California E.A.R. Unit. The ensemble offered the world premiere of an evening-length work, “Dreamtime,” by Ukrainian Las Vegan Virko Baley, at the Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall. Meanwhile, the Angeles String Quartet could be found in Weill a few days later in a program that included the String Quartet No. 1 by John Harbison, who is a former composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and who also just happened to conduct Upshaw in her Bach writhings.

The response to this two-week Los Angeles invasion has been, well, very New York.

Music lovers here have a conspicuous fascination with the glamour and forward-looking ideas of the West Coast, particularly with the way they’re symbolized by the Philharmonic’s music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen. His youth, and commitment to his generation, is novel in the Northeast. Ken Smith, writing in Newsday, even found it peculiar that so convention-breaking a conductor would still dress in black-tie. (Salonen redeemed himself by giving a preconcert talk in blue jeans, however.)

Even so, there had been a certain concern that Salonen, no matter what he wore, wouldn’t get noticed at all this year. Every one of the Philharmonic’s performances had serious competition, and since a fuss had been made about Salonen last year, he was, in a sense, old news.

Still, the Philharmonic’s programs were so uncommon--all 20th century, though mainly neoclassical, and concluding, on Oscar night, with an evening of Stravinsky’s four mature symphonies--that they did, in fact, attract attention. A number of the most gifted and best-known local young composers--Aaron Kernis and Tan Dun, for instance--were seen in the audience, forgoing a tribute to the revered dean of New York composers, Elliott Carter, at Carnegie to attend the New Music Group’s performance. The feisty new weekly Time Out New York emphasized Salonen’s hipness in an advance interview. The New York Times devoted a Sunday piece to recordings of Stravinsky symphonies in which Anthony Thommasini found Salonen’s 1990 version of the Symphony in Three Movements to be the most gratifying.

James R. Oestreich, who reviewed the three Philharmonic programs for the New York Times, was particularly impressed by the New Music Group. He noted that principal clarinetist Lorin Levee’s wildly virtuosic performance of Jouni Kaipainen’s Clarinet Concerto showed what prodigiously gifted individuals the orchestra has in its midst. Oestreich, also found Salonen’s own composition, “Floof,” genuinely hilarious, which it was meant to be.

But Oestreich was not as wowed by the orchestra as a whole, complaining about weakness and unevenness in some of the instrumental sections. Both Oestreich and Smith remarked on the slackness of Salonen’s slow movements, especially in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, but loved the dynamism of his Stravinsky.

Less attention, typically, was paid to the other Angeleno raids on an increasingly staid New York concert life. The Angeles Quartet, for instance, received no reviews by the middle of the week after its performance. But Sellars, who is as rarely seen in New York as he is in Los Angeles these days, is always news, if more often than not bad news, to the New York establishment.

On this occasion, Sellars had warmed up the crowd by suggesting that only Bach could write a 10-minute aria about being unable to speak. “And only Mr. Sellars,” Oestreich replied in the New York Times, “could turn this paragon of private grief and remorse into a gross, public display of breast-beating.”

The New Yorker’s Paul Griffiths, who thought the staging “a bad idea,” felt that after Sellars’ introduction, “all that was left for Ms. Upshaw was a long trial by embarrassment.”

But far and away the strangest press response came for “Dreamtime” and the E.A.R. Unit. “Dreamtime” is a discursive 80-minute work that composer Baley feels summarizes his long and eclectic composing career.

Baley, who teaches at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, is not especially well-known here, and none of the dailies sent reviewers. But Kyle Gann, of the Village Voice, is a Baley champion, and a Gann review of the E.A.R. Unit was listed in the contents of last week’s issue. Turning to that page, however, one found, instead, a review of an entirely different concert.

Dreamtime, indeed.