A Fiery Night With Ligeti, Ehlert, Salonen

The Los Angeles Philharmonic has done it again. Or, more accurately, Ligeti has done it again. Or, more amazingly, Sibylle Ehlert, has done it again.

First Ehlert, the German soprano. I suspect most of the members in the large audience that filled the Japan America Theatre Monday night for the third installment in the Around Ligeti Festival--this time a Green Umbrella program with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group--had no idea of what they were in for.

Some surely had noticed her soaring, thrilling singing as one of the soloists in the Philharmonic’s performance of Ligeti’s Requiem a week ago. And crowds do cluster around the photographs of her in Peter Sellars’ striking Salzburg Festival production of Ligeti’s opera “Le Grand Macabre,” currently on display in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

The German soprano, in the nude, and at one point on her back on a hospital gurney, was simply amazing last summer in the Salzburg production, singing maybe the weirdest and wildest coloratura arias ever written. But it was even more startling Monday to hear her sing some of that music clothed but in a more intimate setting than a large opera house. “Mysteries of the Macabre,” an arrangement of three short arias from the opera for coloratura soprano and chamber orchestra, lasts only eight minutes, but no one who heard it is likely to ever forget it. The audience went wild. It had no choice.

What is it like? That’s impossible to summarize, since it covers every emotion, every kind of craziness, every sort of seduction, every sort of threat that music is able to express. The singing is wild; the theatricality is wild; the vocal writing seems to go beyond the limits of anatomy and physiology. The instrumental writing is also compelling and original, and Salonen, in his ever-impressive control, made Ehlert’s impossible-sounding performance not only possible but natural. (There is a recording with Ehlert and Salonen on the fourth volume of the Sony Classical Ligeti Edition that will give you an idea.)

The program was all Ligeti, and displayed something of his nuttier side rather than the luminous orchestral clouds he is most famous for. “Aventures” and “Nouvelles Aventures” are mini-dramas for three singers and small ensemble written in the early ‘60s and very much of their extravagant time. There is no text, as such, just extraordinary vocal sounds and extreme expressions. You get the sense that anything can happen in this music, and it does. The singers--Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Rose Taylor and Omar Ebrahim--had the audience in stitches.

Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet, with which the concert began, comes from the late ‘60s and is more abstract but no less fantastical or virtuosic. The pieces all go by in a flash, and even if you know it well (it is a favorite among wind players who can manage it) it catches you off-guard time and again with its invention of sounds. At one point, Ligeti’s use of high frequencies literally makes the inner ear buzz, and although a couple of players put plugs in their ears, the Philharmonic ensemble managed it, and all the rest, brilliantly. It was that kind of evening.