The sounds of things to come

Every fall music season quickens the air with hope. Maybe another major -- but little-known -- young talent like soprano Dawn Upshaw or Kiri Te Kanawa will make a local debut and knock our socks off. Maybe an already internationally known conductor like Valery Gergiev will lift the baton here for the first time to let us know what all the excitement has been about.

“As much as I love working with great artists who are well-known and loved,” says Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra music director Jeffrey Kahane, “there are very few things I like better than having someone whose name you’ve never heard of before come onstage and you realize you’re in the presence of genius.”

Kahane has a record of presenting such relatively unknown talent -- think violinist Hilary Hahn, baritone Thomas Quasthoff and pianist Lang Lang -- and he’s about to do it again when he opens the LACO season with Norwegian violinist Henning Kraggerud, one of a number of musical up-and-comers appearing locally over the next several months.

“Henning is not just a great violinist,” says Kahane. “He’s one of the greatest musicians I’ve encountered. He combines a phenomenal technical command and discipline with a spontaneity that makes you feel he’s literally composing the music on the spot. You feel like he’s speaking to you while he’s playing.”

From his home in Olso, Kraggerud says: “Music should be about what it is to be human in the world. If you are going to play music, it should be some way of communicating something that’s not possible to communicate in words.”

Born in Oslo in 1973, Kraggerud has received Norway’s prestigious Grieg Prize and is artist in residence this year at the Bergen International Festival. He’ll play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with the LACO on Oct .1 in San Diego and on Oct. 2 and 3 in Los Angeles. A composer as well as a musician, he will play his own cadenzas in the concerto.

A NOTABLE HERITAGE

Twenty-THREE-year-old pianist Jonathan Biss, who will make his Los Angeles Philharmonic debut Oct. 29 to 31, also has been building his reputation by playing from the heart and avoiding flashy war-horse repertory.

“I regard myself as having been incredibly lucky in my career so far,” Biss says from New York. “I’ve always played only the music I felt strongly attracted to, with few exceptions. The most important thing an artist can do is to try always to make a statement with what we do.”

Born and raised in Bloomington, Ind., Biss is the third generation in a family of professional musicians. His grandmother was Raya Garbousova, for whom Samuel Barber composed his Cello Concerto. His parents are violinist Miriam Fried and violist/violinist Paul Biss. He will play Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Philharmonic, led by James Conlon.

Olga Kern, 29, too comes from a family of musicians. Her great-great-grandmother was a friend of Tchaikovsky, and her great-grandmother sang with Rachmaninoff. But she was a struggling single mother in Russia not so long ago, trying to make a living as a pianist. After she tied for the gold at the 11th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2001, however, her life took one of those storybook turns, leading to what the press soon dubbed “Olgamania.”

“I never felt I changed personally,” Kern says from New York. “I always just lived to play concerts. I played my first, with orchestra, when I was 7. I was always wishing for the life of a real musician. Because I had read so many books of great musicians, how they had 200 concerts a year, I wanted to know how that feels. Now I know. It feels so great. I was born to do this.”

Before her Cliburn victory, Kern had competed in the 1997 competition, but she didn’t advance past the preliminary round. So she went home to Moscow and reinvented herself -- ending an unhappy marriage (to a fellow Cliburn contestant), changing her name from Pushechnikova to Kern (her mother’s maiden name), and dying her brown hair blond. Then she devoted herself only to her son, Vladislav, born in 1989, and endless hours of practice.

Now she’s on the road for months at a time, getting back to Moscow and Vladislav whenever possible. She will play Chopin’s First Piano Concerto with the Warsaw Philharmonic, led by Antoni Witt, on Nov. 8 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre and on Nov. 11 at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara.

Saying conductor Daniel Harding, 30, has made a meteoric rise is an understatement. At 20, the young Briton won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Best Debut Award. Just short of his 21st birthday, he led the Berlin Philharmonic, and later that year he became the youngest conductor of the BBC Proms. He led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1998 and again in 2002, the year France awarded him the title Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the equivalent of a knighthood. He will return to lead the Philharmonic on Nov. 18 to 20 in Mahler’s Symphony No. 10.

“Things happened a bit faster than I would have imagined,” Harding says from his home outside Paris. “But I never felt under pressure to do things I wasn’t ready for.”

Still, he feels he is only at the beginning of his career. “It’s not something anybody learns quickly. It takes time to get the job right.”

Of course, none of these artists would have anything to do if there weren’t composers like Mason Bates creating works for them in the first place. Bates, 27, was part of the Philharmonic’s 2002 “Synergy” program and will have his commissioned piece “Omnivorous Furniture” premiered by the Philharmonic’s New Music Group on Nov. 1. He recently received a Rome Prize, from the American Academy in Rome, and an American Academy in Berlin Prize. This year, he’s been living in Rome. Next year, he will move to Berlin.

“It’s really wonderful when one of these prizes comes along,” Bates says from his home in Berkeley, where he’s finishing his doctorate. “But I try to keep things in perspective. I’ve been writing a lot of music since I was a kid.

“I’m kind of used to the weather patterns. Sometimes it seems it’s raining cats and dogs, and people are beating on the door. Then things get very quiet. There are times,” Bates says, “when you submit a piece and win a competition, and times you don’t. It’s like throwing a fishing line out. Maybe you get bites. The most important thing for me is writing music. I try to keep it real.”

Keeping it real is also what inspired pianist-composer Vijay Iyer and poet Mike Ladd to collaborate on “In What Language?” -- a song cycle that will be presented Oct. 14 to 16 at REDCAT.

The impulse for the work was an incident in 2001 when Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was detained for 10 hours, shackled to a wooden bench, at New York’s JFK airport.

Panahi was en route to Buenos Aires from a film festival in Hong Kong. He had arrived in New York for a layover thinking he didn’t need a transit visa. But because Iran is on a list of nations designated as terrorist sponsors by the State Department, he was handcuffed and eventually sent back to Hong Kong.

Ironically, he had just received a Freedom of Expression award from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures.

Incensed by his treatment, Panahi widely circulated an e-mail protest: “I’m just an Iranian, a filmmaker. But how could I tell this, in what language?”

“This sort of thing happens all the time, as has become absolutely clear since Sept. 11,” says Iyer, a 32-year-old, Albany, N.Y.-born son of Indian immigrants. “Physical, unlawful detainment, or at least unjust detainment of foreign nationals for no particular reason, has become widespread. It’s happened to thousands of people.

“It’s interesting to see how a lot of that structure was in place before that atrocity. Really, there was already this infrastructure of intolerance, which is so deeply a part of American life. That’s what we wanted to address. Jafar was able to articulate it in one way. We’re able to articulate it in another. “

Iyer and Ladd’s multimedia spectacular -- with music, actors and video footage -- seems perfectly suited to the REDCAT experience. Coming from a composer only beginning to make his mark, it may also be a sign of the direction serious music is heading.