Approaching a critical ‘Mass’

“What you see is what you get.”

Marin Alsop says this often about herself in interviews with the press that are posted on her website. She might have said it once more over coffee at her hotel the morning after conducting a performance of John Adams’ “Nixon in China” for Opera Theatre of St. Louis. But she didn’t need to. It’s obvious.

Maybe even a little too obvious.

What you see is a very good conductor who communicates easily with musicians and has an enthusiastic, forthright, punchy style that usually goes over well with audiences. There isn’t a lot of fuss about her work on the podium. There isn’t a lot of fuss about her persona off the podium. She’s dressed in jeans and T-shirt for a warm, humid Midwest summer day, and she’s unusually upbeat for a conductor who was still beating upbeats at 11 the night before. She’s a morning person and has been awake for hours.

What you see is a conductor who has worked her way through the ranks in time-honored fashion; who heads the Bournemouth Symphony, Britain’s oldest orchestra; and who regularly guests with the major American orchestras. She has been coming to the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 1991.

She’s so won the orchestra’s confidence that she was asked to lead Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” at the Hollywood Bowl this Thursday night. The riotous and still controversial countercultural theatrical version of the Roman Catholic liturgy was written for the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 1971 and involves nearly 300 performers, including dancers, actors, a marching band and assorted hippie hangers-on. It is the most ambitious project the Philharmonic has ever attempted at the Bowl.

Indeed, Alsop has reached the point where it wouldn’t be surprising if she was tapped to be the next music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (which may have an opening in 2006, depending on whether Esa-Pekka Salonen renews his contract), the Chicago Symphony (which does have an opening in 2006) or her hometown band, the New York Philharmonic (which is already thinking about who will succeed Lorin Maazel when he steps down in 2009).

But what you see and what you get is also a woman conductor. Alsop has made it -- but that is to say that she has made it further than any other woman conductor. That is to say that, at 47, she gets to conduct standard repertory even though she is still referred to often, and perhaps condescendingly, as a Leonard Bernstein protegee.

Little sexism exists anymore among symphony orchestra managements (Los Angeles and Chicago, two of America’s most important orchestras, are run by women). Orchestra players rarely have a problem with musicians of the opposite sex (the rosters of American orchestras are becoming equally divided between men and women). Some sexism may subsist among orchestra board members, but they can’t expect to get away with it much longer. Yet the glass ceiling remains.

“I don’t think it is a curiosity anymore,” Alsop says of the gender question. “I was over it after the first interview 20 years ago. When we look at it, I would say, ‘Oh, sure, it’s pretty much a nonissue now.’ But if we are realistic and we look at the business, it clearly is an issue, because there are no women leading major orchestras.”

She doesn’t elaborate, but what is left unsaid is that the four other front-ranking American conductors of her generation all have recent North American appointments: Robert Spano in Atlanta, James Conlon at Ravinia, David Robertson in St. Louis and Kent Nagano in Montreal.

Still, as her developing relationship with the Philharmonic indicates, Alsop could ultimately trump them all. She was the only guest conductor this season booked to appear at both Disney Hall and the Bowl (where she will also conduct Brahms and Shostakovich on Tuesday night), and she cannot avoid drawing attention with “Mass.” That’s not only because this theater piece is rarely done -- its scale is daunting, and for a long time it was widely misunderstood -- but also because of what it represents for Alsop on several levels.

“Mass” is the most over-the-top work by a composer for whom the top was outrageously high. Bernstein wrote it at the request of the widowed Mrs. John F. Kennedy. Described as “A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers,” it is not only a setting of the Catholic Mass with additional snappy, sappy texts by Broadway songwriter Stephen Schwartz (“Godspell,” “Wicked”) that question the notion of faith in the time of war. It’s also a musical panoply, stylistically covering everything from rock to serialism. At its premiere, it managed to offend just about everyone.

President Nixon stayed home. J. Edgar Hoover compiled a fat file on the perpetrators. The musical establishment groaned with embarrassment, as did genuine hippies who felt co-opted by the establishment. For the rest of his life, “Mass” proved a sore point for Bernstein.

Alsop, who studied with him at Massachusetts’ Tanglewood in 1988 and saw him as much as she could for the remaining two years of his life, says she sensed a deep wound in the composer the first time the subject of “Mass” came up. “He would alternately bristle or proselytize about it,” she recalls of occasions when Bernstein held forth in his apartment at the Dakota in Manhattan. “And I was smart enough to know not to go near that topic, to say, ‘Listen, let’s talk about Israel or whatever.’ ”

“Mass” reflects the 53-year-old Bernstein’s quest to hang on to youth (he was infatuated with a man half his age), his passion for the Kennedys (the Kennedy White House was like a second home to him), his opposition to the war in Vietnam and his obsessive need to question everything, especially his relation to God. He wrote “Mass,” his most eclectic score, to break down barriers -- between Jews and Christians, between classical and popular music, between antiwar protesters and the government, between believers and nonbelievers, between generations.

Alsop finds that, with Bernstein now gone 14 years and this larger-than-life figure no longer hanging over the work, we are finally able to appreciate the universal aspects of “Mass.” “It is so interesting how many of its themes are cyclical and recur today,” she says. “The ideas of war and faith are maybe more prominent in our global situation. This whole battle of religion versus nonreligion, of Islam versus Christianity, makes ‘Mass’ newly relevant and brings a new depth to the piece.

“You could look at the celebrant’s breakdown almost as representative of the Catholic Church today,” she continues, “as representative of, after the recent scandals, the need for Catholicism to really examine why it’s been shielding these people and hiding these things and to tear it open and have this kind of cathartic breakthrough.”

Alsop also finds that elements that once seemed dated in “Mass” -- particularly the blues and pop idioms -- are no longer a problem. “When I first did it 10 years ago, I think it did sound a little bit out of date,” she confesses. “But now it doesn’t. It’s the same with fashion. When we see people dressed in the hippie kind of thing now, it looks good to me. But 10 years ago, it looked silly. Everything comes around.

“But more important, the message of ‘Mass’ -- the idea that one needs to examine one’s faith, whether it’s faith in religion or faith in humanity -- couldn’t be more inspiring today. In the end, I believe that Bernstein always comes out, like Beethoven, feeling that humanity will triumph.

“It’s a spectacular piece, and I adore it,” Alsop concludes, and she is not alone. In Berlin, Nagano has just made the first new recording since Bernstein’s own 1971 performance; it will be released this fall by Harmonia Mundi. Alsop is planning her own recording, for Naxos in 2006, and she is talking with Channel 4 in Britain about making a radical film version of “Mass” as a follow-up to the station’s striking filmed version of John Adams’ “The Death of Klinghoffer.”

Elsewhere, Bernstein looms large over Alsop as well. In May, she conducted a semistaged performance of “Candide” with the New York Philharmonic that will be televised on PBS in the fall. Naxos recently released her joyous account of the composer’s “Chichester Psalms” and her moody, gripping performance of his suite from “On the Waterfront,” both with the Bournemouth Symphony. “But Bernstein’s a double-edged sword,” Alsop admits. “I don’t want to get pigeonholed as an American doing only American repertory. And the whole protegee thing has gotten a little bit old.”

Beyond Bernstein

Alsop clearly knows that no matter how fabulously she might succeed with “Mass” or “Candide” or “Nixon in China,” that kind of thing makes for a limited career. She has to be pressed to talk about it, but no conductor will get far without a careerist drive. And for a woman of Alsop’s generation, the ambition must be particularly large.

A Juilliard-trained violinist and the daughter of professional musicians, she began her conducting life by forming her own New York orchestra, Concordia, which stood out for its inventive approach to crossover. Her early appointments -- as music director of orchestras in Long Island and Eugene, Ore. -- allowed her to learn standard repertory but also to experiment. In 1993, she moved up to the Colorado Symphony in Denver, where she remained music director until this year and where she is still based. And in 1994, her experimental side attracted the St. Louis Symphony, which created the post of creative conducting chair for her.

But it was in 2002, when she became music director of the Bournemouth Symphony, that the business really took notice. Having been a principal guest conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the City of London Sinfonia, she was already known in Britain. Bournemouth made her a star. After her first season, the influential magazine Gramophone voted her Artist of the Year.

It is not lost on Alsop, of course, that some of the allure in Britain is her exoticism: an American woman with a flair for American music. But she notes with particular satisfaction that she is finally being accepted on her own terms, terms that include an abiding love of Brahms, of the Russians and of early 20th century works. Next season, she will begin a Brahms cycle with the Royal Philharmonic in London, and Naxos will record it. She will also record a Bartok disc for Naxos in Bournemouth.

Ultimately, you cannot take the American out of Alsop, and it would be tough to take out the New Yorker. Her other ongoing position is as music director of the Cabrillo Festival, the funky West Coast summer event that was begun in the Santa Cruz area 41 years ago by the late Lou Harrison and will conclude its two-week season today with a concert of recent works by Americans Jennifer Higdon and Christopher Rouse and the popular Scottish composer James MacMillan. There, Alsop has little choice or desire not to concentrate on current American music (although she’s added Brits to the mix) in a laid-back milieu. But the environment, she concedes, proved a culture shock when she took the post in 1992.

“I had to learn to calm down and not speak in abbreviated sentences,” she says. “You know, not have the New York hysteria going on all the time. They want you to listen to everything they’re going to say. At first, I almost needed a trank it was so mellow.”

Now she says she never wants to leave. “It’s a real artistic oasis. It’s the only place I work, certainly in America, where the question ‘Will it sell?’ never comes up. And that’s liberating. I have complete, complete freedom, and the atmosphere is exactly what a festival should be. The audience is engaged, and since we don’t have any money -- as we say, cash is not our currency at Cabrillo -- the musicians come for their per diem only. I mean, they don’t get paid, they work their butts off, and then at the end of day they all seem so relaxed.

“Maybe that’s what we should all strive for.”

But first there’s “Mass.” And there’s that place for her at a major American orchestra.

Someday. Somewhere.

*

Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood

What: Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D Major with soloist Joshua Bell; Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday

Price: $1 to $103

Contact: (323) 850-2000

Also

What: Bernstein’s “Mass” with the Pacific Chorale and Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, baritone Jubilant Sykes and boy soprano Eugene Olea; directed by Gordon Hunt

When: 8 p.m. Thursday