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Review: The 28-year-old conductor leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a pair of Mozart symphonies and, with Gil Shaham, Berg’s Violin Concerto. The Orange County Register, Nov. 20, 2009. SEE SLIDE SHOW 

Gustavo Dudamel, who led his third program, and ninth concert, of the month with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, is a traditionalist. A meat and potatoes man. Well, at least some of the time. For all the fuss surrounding the new music director (“60 Minutes” is apparently preparing a third segment on him; they didn’t do one on his predecessor), he is in many ways a throwback to another era.

The program paired the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Alban Berg, exemplars of the First and Second Viennese Schools, respectively. It was a good program, good to see Mozart given the place of honor he deserves. Mozart’s Symphony No. 38, “Prague,” and Symphony No. 41, “Jupiter,” stood as bookends to the agenda. In between these twin peaks came Berg’s Violin Concerto, with Gil Shaham as soloist.

Dudamel’s Mozart is Old School (not a bad thing in this listener’s book). It ignores virtually everything we have learned about historical music practice in the last 50 years. It neither handles the music with kid gloves (holding it at a polite distance) nor with an analytical scalpel (treating it as an example of ancient practices). It lives, it breathes, it sings. It is human. It is no nonsense.

For one thing, Dudamel chose to use an (almost) full-sized orchestra, not the drastically reduced numbers so popular these days. (He had six double basses, placed straight behind the woodwinds, seven cellos and 13 first violins.) And he had the orchestra playing out fully, the strings digging in with full bows when appropriate, the woodwinds playing out nobly and lyrically, the brass and drums punctuating energetically.

His tempos were reasonable, judicious, for the most part, allowing the music space to make its points. There were two exceptions. The second movement of the “Prague,” marked Andante, was turned into a true slow movement, and with Dudamel also taking the repeats, it eventually sagged a little under the weight. The Menuetto of the “Jupiter,” marked Allegretto, was similarly slowed, its courtly manner becoming a kind of swaying and luxuriant waltz, certainly not ineffective but perhaps not altogether necessary.

But never mind, this was lovely Mozart. It had personality. The phrases were sentences, shaped lovingly and inflected meaningfully, but always with an eye toward the horizon, the full paragraph. Mozart’s conversational style came through abidingly. Dudamel coaxed particularly fine work from the Philharmonic’s strings, who played with warm and supple tone and unfailing expressiveness. The fugues and fugal sections of these works (and there are many) were taken with vigor and point.

If Dudamel’s emphasis at this early stage seems more on expression than precision (evidence was heard Thursday in the sometimes messy fast notes that came directly following long notes) that’s not such a bad thing. The playing communicates. The zest with which these players tore into the “Jupiter” finale alone was enough to fill most evenings.

Shaham, among the most talented of his generation’s violinists (he’s 38), offered a thoughtful account of the Berg. The work is a strange hybrid, combining the twelve-tone practices of Schoenberg with tonal harmonies, a requiem for Alma Mahler’s daughter with a secret love letter to Berg’s mistress, quotes from folk song and Bach with Expressionist angst. One of its main themes is constructed from the open strings on the violin, played simply up then down.

It is essentially a Romantic work, though. Shaham’s take was more orderly than excessive, however. He never pushed his violin to uncomfortable extremes (perhaps he’s too good for that). He colored the line with judiciously doled amounts of vibrato and non-vibrato, deciphered convoluted lines, and seemed comfortable much of the time to simply join the orchestra as an equal among chamber musicians.

Dudamel and the orchestra supported subtly, with restraint. We’ve heard more intense climaxes in this work than produced here, more swooning emoting, more touching endings, but this Berg had clarity, sense and sensibility, which was rather refreshing, really.

• Los Angeles Philharmonic
• With: Gustavo Dudamel, conductor; Gil Shaham, violin
• Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall
• When: Nov. 19
• Next: 8 p.m. Nov. 20-21; 2 p.m. Nov. 22
• How much: Call for availability
• Call: 323-850-2000
• Online: laphil.com

related links: gustavo dudamel leads l.a. phil in schubert, berio

gustavo dudamel unleashes a potent verdi requiem, or, what else did you expect?

Post from: The Arts Blog

On Sept. 11, 2001, playwright Bill Cain watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center burn and collapse. That cataclysm inspired him to write a play, “Equivocation,” which made its California premiere Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse (it debuted earlier this year at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival).

Like most good artists, Cain addressed the messy issues of 9-11 and its aftermath through inference and metaphor – a method often employed by Shakespeare, for example, who deftly tackled contemporary political controversies by cloaking them in history and fiction.

Shakespeare (Joe Spano, pictured at left) is the pivotal character in “Equivocation.” “Shag,” as he’s affectionately known to the other members of his theatrical cooperative, The King’s Men, has been commissioned to do the impossible: turn a one-sided account of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot into a play. (The failed conspiracy was hatched by disgruntled English Catholics to kill King James I and his Protestant allies while he was in the House of Lords by blowing the place sky high.)

The mastermind of this dastardly P.R. project is Sir Robert Cecil (Connor Trinneer), the King’s Secretary of State. A scheming, crippled Machiavelli with more than a passing resemblance to Richard III, Cecil will stop at nothing, including intimidation and blackmail, to transform the official version of the Gunpowder Plot – described in a slim book by the King himself – into a cautionary play for the masses.

Shag hesitates. He and his colleagues need the money; they have mortgages and families.  This gig, though, is odious. “We don’t do politics,” Shag tells Cecil. “We do histories. True stories of the past.”

Shag is caught in the kind of trap that is the nightmare of every writer with integrity: lie or die. If his play even brushes up against the truth – a tangled web, he soon discovers, that would implicate Cecil and reveal the assassination conspiracy as a propaganda tale – he and his company are dead men. If he creates the revisionist history that the King and Cecil want, he’s a political pawn of the lowest order.

In desperation, Shag visits two of the alleged conspirators in prison.

Young Tom Wintour (Patrick J. Adams), weary from torture and fear, softens Shag’s heart; he agrees to secretly deliver a letter to Tom’s wife and children (an act of pity that Cecil is quick to use as leverage, of course).

Later, Shag meets Father Henry Garnet (Harry Groener), a leading Jesuit whose fervent Catholicism placed him under constant suspicion in a Protestant country that had been persecuting Catholics for almost a century. Shag’s interest in Garnet is partly self-serving: he wants to learn the Jesuit art of equivocation, avoiding self-incriminating statements by the careful parsing of statements and principles — the only way to speak the truth in difficult times.

Will the King’s play get written? Will Shag manage to salvage his self-respect without getting himself and his colleagues hanged? And why is he so cruel to his sweet, wise and all-knowing daughter, Judith (Troian Bellisario)? Watching Cain work out these questions is tremendous fun, and not incidentally provides some fascinating (if completely suppositional) insight into the mind and creative process of history’s greatest playwright.

There’s plenty here for Shakespeare buffs to enjoy: talk of his dishonored father and possible secret Catholicism, his tangled relationship with his family as his success kept him physically and emotionally removed from Stratford, the inspiration for plays such as “King Lear” and “Macbeth.”

There are also moments of brilliant comedy. Shag’s actors struggle with Lear’s mad scene, doomed to make a hash of it by their outsized egos and dim grasp of the big thematic picture. The King’s love of witches is indulged, many times. And the young, preening Scottish monarch has a thing for the lassies – especially if they’re laddies underneath the dress, as they were in the productions of Shakespeare’s era.

Director David Esbjornson goes for an unadorned look (his set is bare-bones black and Frances Kenny’s costumes are non-descript and modern), the better to emphasize Cain’s muscular and engrossing script. The actors, four of whom assume a rogue’s gallery of roles, smartly handle the frequent changes of tone that the quick shifts of scene and character demand, using a bare minimum of props and costume changes. Spano’s Shag is impressive – a fading and wistful literary warrior, almost too weary at times to fight this battle. Trinneer’s Cecil and Groener’s Garnet are also vivid, memorable creations.

Cain’s play works so well, I think, not just because it entertainingly examines Shakespeare and his time but because it is fundamentally Shakespearean in scope and technique. It addresses contemporary issues allegorically. It’s filled with delicious conceits: many play-within-a-play sequences, cross-dressing, gruesome deaths, courtroom drama, royal intrigue, dirty dealing at the highest levels. And, as in so many Shakespeare plays, everything in this story emanates from and comes back to the family — in this case, Shag’s clan, living, estranged and dead, and his London band of brothers, the King’s Men.

Is “Equivocation” close to historical reality? Probably not, but that deception is part of the playwright’s point.

Besides its robust success as a good tale, “Equivocation” is a celebration of the strangely cathartic magic of theater. Even as he thoroughly entertains us, Cain reminds us, again and again, that we are being held in thrall by a work of high artifice (Judith even complains, in a soliloquy, about how she hates soliloquy). 

“Theater is our religion!” proclaims Richard (Groener), the larger-than-life veteran actor who’s the alpha dog of Shag’s company. Ironically, in this story it’s the only belief system that seems pure, true and ultimately impervious to the most powerful enemies and ideologies.

In our own turgid times, as in Shakespeare’s, many of us might agree with him.

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The great composer, conductor, lexicographer and bon vivant Nicolas Slonimskywrote a series of tongue-in-cheek works during his lifetime (1894-1995), including “Mobius Strip-Tease” (a perpetual vocal canon “notated on a Mobius band to be revolved around the singer’s head”), “My Toy Balloon” (”a set of variations on a Brazilian song, which includes in the score 100 colored balloons to be exploded fff at the climax”) and a version of Beethoven’s Fifth in which the original intervals are reduced to their square roots (or close enough).

He also wrote a series of “advertising songs,” including “Children Cry for Castoria” (1925), using authentic texts from The Saturday Evening Post. Here’s the aged composer singing it.

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“Spring Awakening” is not for prudes or theatrical purists. But O.C. audiences surprised me during its opening Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Despite its frank depiction of teen lust – the first act ends with simulated sex, center stage – there were few walkouts.

Unfortunately, all that titillation can’t mask the musical’s biggest flaw: its thin story carries few surprises and plenty of clichés.

Shortly after they became collaborators in 1999, composer/performer Duncan Sheik and lyricist Steven Sater began working on a musical adaptation of a dour and cultish 19th-century work by German playwright Frank Wedekind. The result, after sevens years of toil, is a rock opera drenched in enough sex and sweaty teen angst to make “Rent” look like a Rodgers and Hammerstein romance.

The duo struck gold. “Spring Awakening” won eight 2007 Tony awards and played for 859 performances on Broadway.

A touring production has been drawing in crowds for more than a year. It played last fall at L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre. The same version, with two new actors in the lead male roles, stays in Costa Mesa through Nov. 29. It’s full of the stridency, willful eccentricity and emotional high points that so endeared the Broadway version to audiences and critics.

But those who know Wedekind’s original script might be put off by the degree of sound and fury these troubled teens deliver. You have to muster a mighty willing suspension of disbelief to swallow the sight of Victorian-era German kids whipping cordless microphones out of their petticoats and schoolboy’s uniforms to sing, lustily and graphically, about teen sexuality.

Taylor Trensch and Jake Epstein play Moritz and Melchior, two school chums in a backward German town, circa 1890. Melchior is the dangerous one – smart, smooth, handsome and rebellious. Moritz feels the same churning dissatisfactions with the status quo that Melchior does, but he doesn’t know how to express it.

Moritz is far more naive about sex than his pal; he’s also a klutz, the complete opposite of Melchior socially and emotionally. To help Moritz out (and aid him in the interpretation of his strange dreams), Melchior creates a handwritten and illustrated sex manual.

As Moritz struggles with his Latin homework and his inchoate yearnings, Melchior finds himself drawn to Wendla (Christy Altomare), a girl he has known since childhood. Melchior thought he knew Wendla, but her feelings of frustration about the world uncannily mirror his own. They’re drawn to each other like a pair of magnets.

Unfortunately for Wendla, her squeamish mother has refused to provide the girl with the facts of life. After a brief encounter with Melchior in a hayloft, Wendla becomes pregnant.

Their sexual misadventure takes place in an atmosphere of barely repressed hysteria. This German town is a hothouse rampant with beautiful flowers and rank weeds.

The boys’ sadistic schoolmaster (played by John Wojda, who deftly handles all of the adult male roles) brutalizes them and conspires with his colleague (Angela Reed, also excellent, who plays all adult female characters) to fail Moritz out of expediency and spite, even though he has passed his mid-term exam.

It all ends badly, but not before the kids express their rage and randiness in songs such as “My Junk,” “The Word of Your Body” and “Touch Me.” Sheik’s score can be strident, tender or achingly beautiful – it’s by far the best element of the show – but, as mentioned, it’s deliberately out-of-sync with the story’s 1890s context.

Trensch is entertaining and persuasive in the role of Moritz. Tense to the point of hyperventilation, he’s like a scampering bag of hormones primed to explode. Trensch also finds ways to make the character lovable – an essential quality, because Melchior’s cruel fate is one of the two tragedies that propel this story to its sad conclusion.

Epstein, like Trensch, replaced a Broadway veteran who began the tour. His Melchior is a familiar but endearing teen archetype: the self-confident alpha dog whose exterior conceals a mass of insecurities. When Wendla draws him into a torture game, Epstein makes the moment seem truly heartrending for his character.

Wendla could easily seem like little more than a naïve victim, but Christy Altomare gives her satisfying complexity. Wendla is torn between fear of the unknown and burning curiosity, and Altomare always lets us see the struggle.

Director Michael Mayer is adept at both quiet moments and high-energy group scenes. Everyone struts and flies around Christine Jones’ set, which captures the dark oppressiveness of provincial 19th-century Germany without restricting the performers’ movements. Kevin Adams’ lighting design is hauntingly beautiful, featuring strange upstage constellations of red and blue lights that suggest a universe out of kilter.

Choreographer Bill T. Jones gives the characters some attractive teens-in-torment movement, which can be a lot of fun but raises yet again the fundamental question that plagues this musical: Are these kids Victorian characters or rock stars? For some, it’s impossible to see them as both.

And no matter what you make of them, their story will seem too familiar.

‘Spring Awakening’

Where: Segerstrom Hall, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: Nov. 17-29. 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday; 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday

How much: $20-$70 ($20 student rush tickets available one hour before each performance)

Call: 714-556-2787

Online: ocpac.org

Post from: The Arts Blog

The Geffen Playhouse has landed the local premiere of a hot new script, Bill Cain’s “Equivocation.” The period drama, which uses the 1605 Gunpowder Plot as the springboard for a fascinating suppositional tale of intrigue and political skullduggery, was a talker in its world-premiere production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival earlier this year. (At left is a still from the Geffen production with Patrick J. Adams and Connor Trinneer.)

A bit of background: The Gunpowder Plot.

For the Geffen Playhouse production, director David Esbjornson has chosen to present the story in modern dress, and the actors speak without English accents.

Recently I talked with four of the actors in the Geffen production – Harry Groener, Connor Trinneer, Patrick J. Adams and Brian Henderson, who share dozens of roles – about the challenges, pleasures and undeniable contemporary resonance of “Equivocation.”

The Orange County Register: You’re all playing multiple roles. Are there a lot of quick changes of costume?

Groener: I’m not sure that you’re going to get exhausted watching us. Hopefully you’ll get caught up in the story. Our hope is that that’s the fun of it – the storytelling is the primary focus.

Register: Does the multiple role-playing serve another purpose?

Patrick J. Adams: If you read Bill’s other plays, there’s a theatricality to them which is unique, I think. All of a sudden you can have a stage full of people who were until that moment sitting in a lecture hall now leaping forward two years in time and in a completely different location – with just a change of lighting. Bill writes plays in which time is not a linear thing, so the actors are used in the service of that idea. Sometimes that means switching roles very quickly.

Register: Some of the roles are recognizably Shakespearean?

Brian Henderson: Yes. There are several plays within the play – I can’t remember how many, quite a few – and some of them are excerpts from “Macbeth,” “Lear” and other Shakespearean tragedies. There’s also a piece from “Henry VI.” Shakespeare is also a character in this play.

Register: What does the title refer to?

Henderson: It’s about telling the truth and yet managing not to incriminate yourself, which is what certain people had to do when they were being interrogated by the government about their allegiances and other things.

Register: I’ve read that the themes seem very relevant. How so?

Groener: It’s about weapons of mass destruction, and about twisting the truth and having one side control the reality of the situation, which all seems very familiar, I think, to a 21st-century American audience.

Connor Trinneer: But it’s not right on the nose. You don’t go, “Oh, I know why he’s doing this right now!” In Ashland they did a very classical interpretation of the play. You don’t have to make the parallels obvious to get the points across.

Register: Why aren’t you using British accents, since this story happened in the heart of London and all the characters are British?

Groener: I’ve been doing som reading on (historical) accents and they think that British accents at this time (the beginning of the 1600s) sounded pretty much like Americans sound now, or not far from it. Closer to what we sound like than what the English sound like now.

Henderson: Also, it’s not that important to the story. If people start asking themselves why we’re not speaking in dialect then we’re not doing our jobs.

Register: Did you talk about making the contemporary parallels explicit with the director?

Trinneer: We had lots of conversations about everything. Rehearsing this play meant starting every day with a great conversation abut how it relates. I remember us talking about (the WMD/Iraq debate) and how it resembles the Gunpowder Plot in some ways.

Henderson: The idea of the government trying to control the information that people get seems like a pretty resonant theme to me.

Groener: And the idea that you can reshape history in the retelling of it. What’s that old saying? “Whoever owns the narrative owns history.” That’s what’s going on in the play. And I think we’re seeing some of that now in this country – people fighting really hard to control the stories that unfolded over the last eight years.

Adams: Also, this play has a lot to do with religion, which is worth noting, and the persecution of people because of their religious beliefs. It’s about Protestants vs. Catholics at a time when faith was such a divisive issue and wars were fought over it. So the connection to our time is pretty obvious.

Post from: The Arts Blog

A view of the music room inside Elizabeth Colyear Vincent’s Newport Beach home.

A Newport Beach woman’s estate brought in $2.3 million at Bonhams & Butterfields on Sunday, Nov. 8.

Elizabeth Colyear Vincent’s collection of 18th and 19th century furniture, porcelain figures, artworks and urns attracted about 240 people to the L.A. auction house. Calls and absentee bids also came in from Australia, Turkey, England, France, Germany, Italy and Greece.

The event was one of Bonhams & Butterfields most successful furniture and decorative art auctions to date.

Many of the items far surpassed their initial pre-sale estimates, according to Andrew Jones, L.A. director of European furniture and decorative arts for Bonhams & Butterfields.

“It was a flying success,” Jones said. “It went past everybody’s expectations. During the past few years, its been really tough with the economic climate. But this was fresh, quality merchandise available to the public.”

The top sales, or lots, were a Louis XVI-style gilt bronze mounted kingwood vitrine (late 19th century) and a pair of Louis XVI-style gilt bronze floor lamps, or torcheres (also late 19th century). Both sold for $91,500.

Colyear Vincent was a longtime Newport Beach resident who died Feb. 1 at the age of 94. She was an ardent supporter of the Orange County Perfrorming Arts Center and Hoag Hospital.

Related and previous posts on Visual Art by Richard Chang:

Estate of Newport philanthropist up for auction

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I’ve put together another list of classical recordings, this one for kids. It was an interesting exercise for me, not as easy as I initially thought it might be. I ended up relying a lot on my own experiences as a child listener and as a parent of a child who enjoys classical music.

Anyhow, have a look at 10 classical recordings to start your kid with, click through the slide show, and then when (and if) you have a moment, come back here and offer your own suggestions.

related links:

10 Mozart recordings to get you started

10 classical recordings to start your collection

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“Virgin No. 71,” an oil on canvas by Makan Emadi. On view at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana.

We’ve heard about and seen images from the unrest in the streets of Iran after the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But have we heard much about Iranian contemporary art?

It seems to be the new big thing, with the struggles in the homeland headlining international news, and the creative projects of the diaspora coming into increasing focus. Art shows have opened across the country and the world, from New York to London, Paris, Vienna and Athens.

Shirin Neshat may be one of the more recognizable names out there. The video artist won a Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale in 1999, and a Silver Lion for Director at the Venice Film Festival in September. There’s a feature in Art in America about her in the June issue.

In fact, the November issue of Art in America has a cover feature about Iranian art, although I couldn’t find it online.

Here in Orange County, the Grand Central Art Center is presenting “Hidden Wounds, Paper Bullets: Iranian Contemporary Art.” The group show opened Nov. 7 and runs through Jan. 10, 2010.

Artists in that show are: Yari Ostovany, Alina Mnatsakanian, Hadieh Shafie, Taraneh Hemami, Max Emadi and Aydin Aghdashloo. Most of them live in the U.S. now, although Aghdashloo still lives in Tehran.

A bunch of scholars and guests spoke during the opening, and there was a performance by artist Mnatsakanian.

On Dec. 5 from 5-6 p.m., there will be a panel discussion with scholars from Pepperdine University. On Dec. 8 at 7 p.m., the Grand Central Art Center will continue with its “Iran and Contemporary Cinema” series.

All events and admission are free. Check out www.grandcentralartcenter.com for details.

Post from: The Arts Blog

The touring version of “Mary Poppins,” a collaboration between Disney and theatrical mega-producer Cameron Mackintosh, opened last night at the Ahmanson Theatre, where it plays through Feb. 7. Adding to the sense of occasion was the presence of Dick Van Dyke, who played Bert the chimney sweep in the 1964 Disney movie musical. He appeared onstage during the bows and graciously passed the mantle to the excellent Gavin Lee, who plays Bert in the touring production.  (See some excerpts in the above video.)

Review: “Mary Poppins.”

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Review: Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in two unfinished symphonies by Schubert, one completed by Berio. The Orange County Register, Nov. 11, 2009. SEE SLIDE SHOW

A week after raising the roof of Walt Disney Concert Hall with a powerful reading of Verdi’s Requiem, Gustavo Dudamel, still in demonstration mode as the new music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, went in a different direction. This weekend’s agenda (heard Saturday night) offered, unusually, a pair of unfinished symphonies and some folk songs.

The not-so-flashy program didn’t give the young conductor much opportunity to do what he has quickly become famous for, which is creating electricity. He did not, on this occasion, become airborne. There was no call for it.

But never mind. The event did demonstrate Dudamel’s savvy programming skills as well as his dedication to contemporary music. These are qualities, of course, that his predecessor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, was famous for; Dudamel continues in the same vein, builds upon it. The event also showed that the young maestro doesn’t require being the center of musical attention at all times, certainly yet another quality in his favor.

The two unfinished symphonies were both by Schubert, who seemed to have a thing for leaving symphonies unfinished. We first heard the fragments of his Tenth Symphony, orchestrated by the late Italian avant-gardist Luciano Berio and then stitched together in a most imaginative manner. On the other end came the official “Unfinished” Symphony, nowadays designated as No. 8. In between, soprano Dawn Upshaw had a go at Berio’s delicate and playful “Folk Songs” from 1964.

Berio’s “Rendering,” the composer’s “restoration” of Schubert’s Tenth, takes an interesting approach to the fragments. Others, namely the British musicologist Brian Newbould, have completed the work, filling in the gaps of what Schubert left at his death with speculative Schubert to form a whole, half-hour symphony in three movements. Quite good, too.

Berio’s approach is otherwise. His restoration takes his aesthetic from painting and “is made along the lines of the modern restoration of frescoes that aims at reviving the old colors without, however, trying to disguise the damage that time has caused.” He orchestrates Schubert’s piano sketches for the Tenth faithfully, using the same orchestra that Schubert used for his “Unfinished” Symphony, plus a celesta. But where the Schubert fragments leave a gap, Berio fills in with soft, dreamy, otherworldly Berio, atonal but exquisitely so, composed using Schubertian elements, but clearly not Schubert.

The effect is as if a Schubert symphony is momentarily blanketed in thick banks of fog – the sun is hidden, the vision blurred, and time stops. But then, presto, the Schubert begins again and the skies are blue as if nothing happened. It is all very clever, beautiful and interesting, though one noticed a certain listener’s psychology setting in: One waits in anticipation of the next wave of fog to roll in.

Dudamel led a poised, even unassuming reading, the Schubert sections played with much gusto and feeling if not perfect polish, the Berio as dappled and surreal as necessary but not showily so.

Upshaw gave a plain and unaffected reading of the “Folk Songs,” a set of 11 real and “composed” folk songs from around the world and in several languages. Berio’s settings are for the most part tonal and “straight,” but he does throw in some atonal decoration here and there, some polytonal harmony, as well as occasional modernistic coloring. Upshaw used her non-operatic voice, clear, bright, expressive, the vibrato carefully doled. Dudamel supported quietly, pointedly.

It remained, then, for the conductor to make his big impression after intermission with the “Unfinished,” and that he did. The maturity of his interpretations of the traditional repertoire is remarkable. There was nothing fussy about this reading, but it was completely realized – the heavy rhythms stamped out forcefully, the lyrical lines threaded long and smoothly, the surfaces lovingly cared for (the soft playing had air in it), the grand and tragic oratory perfectly timed and emphasized. Both of his tempos were a little on the slow side, but no matter, it only allowed the music to breath and the expression to intensify, as if the music were a sauce left on a low simmer, reducing to its essentials.

• Los Angeles Philharmonic
• With: Gustavo Dudamel, conductor; Dawn Upshaw, soprano
• Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall
• When: Nov. 14
• Next: Nov. 19-22, Dudamel leads the orchestra in a Mozart/Berg program, with violinist Gil Shaham
• How much: Call for availability
• Call: 323-850-2000
• Online: laphil.com

photo: the mourning of st. francis by giotto

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