“Musical Friends” Unveil the Unfamiliar at Mount Wilson

l-r: Kyle Gilner (violin), Jonah Sirota (viola), Geoff Osika (double bass), Micah Wright (clarinet),
Gigi Brady (oboe).

REVIEW

“A Celebration of Strings and Winds” by Hans Gál, Britten, and Prokofiev

DAVID J BROWN

In his usual welcome at the penultimate event in this year’s season of Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome, Mount Wilson Institute Trustee and COO Dan Kohne asked for shows of hands from those who were making their initial visit and those who had been before. The rough split was about 60/40 in favor of the first-timers—doubly encouraging both because it showed that the word about these unique seasons and venue is well and truly out and, given that the seating area encircling the 100-inch Hooker telescope was healthily filled if not a sell-out, that today's relatively unfamiliar program was not an audience turn-off, either for newcomers or seasoned attendees.

Jonah Sirota.

The violist Jonah Sirota had curated it as an exploration by a group of “musical friends” of chamber works scored for both stringed and woodwind instruments; as he noted in his introduction, there’s plenty of repertoire for each family separately, but together? Not so much. Influenced by the venue, his choice had homed in on pieces written within two decades of the telescope’s opening, of which the first to be played was at once the last completed (in 1935) and by the oldest and longest-lived of the three composers, as well as the figure least known today.

This was Hans Gál (1890-1987), an Austrian/Jewish composer, performer, teacher and scholar who, when he wrote his Serenade for clarinet, violin and cello, Op. 93, had already had his academic career in Germany summarily terminated by the Nazis, and within three years would flee to the safety of Britain. This Serenade, though, bears no signs of personal turmoil, being one of many elegant and poised exemplars of the musical values enshrined in the great Austro-German classical tradition, composed by Gál throughout his very long career.

Hans Gál.

The first of its four movements, a sonata structure headed Cantabile, opens with a long, gently aspiring clarinet melody, played here with expansive easefulness by Micah Wright. Very soon, though, this initial serenity is subverted, first by a faster, rather spiky extension of that main theme, and then throughout the remainder of the quite lengthy and elaborate movement by quicksilver changes of rhythm and texture, masterfully distributed by Gál between the three instruments, and equally masterfully navigated by Mr. Wright and Kyle Gilner (violin) and Jonathan Flaksman (cello).

Their affectionate treatment was marked in the latter part of the movement by subtle drawings-out of apparently concluding cadences only for the music to quietly turn aside and continue, as if saying “No, we’re not quite done yet…”

Micah Wright.

The Cantabile, at well over one-third of the Serenade’s total length, is by far its longest movement and is succeeded by a Burletta—effectively a concise scherzo-and-trio whose vigorous and scurrying outer sections enclose a gentle, slow-moving contemplation led by the violin. The third movement Intermezzo, with its long-breathed clarinet melody over plucked strings, similarly showed Gál’s skill at conveying spaciousness within a brief span (just three minutes), its concluding clarinet cadenza running straight into the jaunty strains of the Giocoso finale—which nonetheless accommodates a reprise of the Intermezzo’s exquisite musings before the cheerful music returns.

Kyle Gilner.

This rare but memorable and gorgeously played opener was followed by the 18-year-old Benjamin Britten’s Phantasy Quartet for Oboe and String Trio, Op. 2 from 1932. This wasn’t the first occasion on which this work had been heard in the 100-inch Hooker telescope dome; series Artistic Director and cellist Cécilia Tsan played it with three of her own musical friends in the second concert of the third season on 2 June, 2019, and it was instructive to compare impressions of that performance (reviewed here) with this account from four different and equally skilled collaborators.

Gigi Brady,

More than in that earlier performance, I felt, the piece was dominated here by Gigi Brady’s oboe, which presented as a confident, even at times imperious, protagonist throughout the work’s several varied and linked episodes, beginning with its quasi-pastoral melody that blooms after the opening march from the three strings (Mr. Sirota here joining Messrs. Gilner and Flaksman).

Over 24 measures Britten builds this up from the most fragmentary, uncertain beginnings, muted, ppp, and played pizzicato sul tasto (on the fingerboard). The players’ assured handling of its assembly gave it just the right sense of growing aim from initial hesitancy.

Benjamin Britten in 1930.

Whither was the youthful genius Britten marching with such strutting purpose, and where from? As ever, his late-flowering contribution to this peculiarly English sub-genre of chamber music (always distinguished by that “ph” for “phantasy” to label the single, multi-section movement) impressed by his acute ear for striking sonorities, skillful creation of an original, complex, and unpredictable design, and remarkable maturity of expression overall.

It could be argued that Gál’s designating his Op. 93 as a “serenade” might mislead some listeners to expect something more lighthearted and simple than the intricately wrought structure that it actually is, and conversely the simple formal title of Prokofiev’s Quintet in G minor, Op. 39 equally and thoroughly belies the zany, sometimes disquieting, circus romp with which these consummately skilled musical friends concluded their fascinating program.

Jonathan Flaksman.

The precise scenario envisaged under the title Trapèze by the ballet master Boris Romanov when he commissioned its score from Prokofiev in 1924 now seems lost to time, but as Prokofiev also conceived his work for concert performance, the music itself lived on, and presumably with the ballet in mind, the instrumental line-up he chose—oboe, clarinet, violin, viola and double bass—certainly enables extreme timbral contrast.

For this performance Micah Wright returned to join Gigi Brady for the work’s woodwind pairing, while in the strings Kyle Gilner and Jonah Sirota remained on stage, Jonathan Flaksman departed, and Geoff Osika came to the platform for the first time as double bassist to complete the ensemble.

Prokofiev and Stravinsky in Paris, 1920.

The first of its six brief movements (their overall cohesion here marred, sadly, by intermittent applause) is as with the Gál the longest, though not to such a marked degree. The implications of its heading Tema con variazioni are only fulfilled to a limited extent. There are just two variations, with the movement falling into two halves comprising (1) the long theme itself—given a notably tongue-in-cheek lachrymose quality in this performance—plus the equally extensive and medium-paced first variation, and (2) the second variation, Vivace, with gadfly leaps and glissando squeals all over the ensemble, followed by a full reprise of the lugubrious theme.

Next up is an Andante energico. Was Prokofiev teasing expectations and players’ abilities with this seemingly contradictory marking? If so, Mr. Osika responded as well as anyone could imagine with the elephantine thudding and chugging of his opening double bass solo, after which what is effectively continuous variation on that solo’s elements from all the players well lived up to what Mr. Sirota called the work’s “rag-tag circus band quality.” The movement’s unexpectedly long-drawn quiet ending gives way to more chugging and raucousness in the ensuing Allegro sostenuto, ma con brio, but for me the highlight was the fourth, Adagio pesante, movement.

Geoff Osika.

Played with measured intensity, this grim, lowering drama surely marked in the original ballet the entry of some sinister malefactor (a distant pre-echo of Pennywise, perhaps?), as well as in its latter stages recalling somewhat the great glistening, downward-sliding chords with which Prokofiev’s on-and-off friend and rival Stravinsky opens the second part of The Rite of Spring. Frenetic scurrying was back in the fifth movement, Allegro precipitato, the players here tending to zoom on through the qualifying ma non troppo presto.

Always unexpected, Prokofiev concludes his Quintet with an Andantino that begins with what sounds like a stately, slightly ghostly dance that then veers off into more discursive, dissonant scampering. The activity eventually dies down to a pizzicato double bass solo before the slow dance returns, Tempo primo. This builds up a considerable head of steam before violent sextuplets in the clarinet, viola, and double bass chase down, tumultuoso e precipitato, to a single, cut off, final chord.

Cécilia Tsan: Artistic Director, Sunday
 Afternoon Concerts in the Dome.

Perhaps the Mount Wilson audience was too discomposed by the sheer weirdness of the piece to give the five players the standing ovation they most richly deserved for their virtuosic and impactful performance. For this listener the whole concert was one of the richest and most rewarding yet in eight years of attending Cécilia Tsan’s and Dan Kohne’s truly unique series.

This season has been both the biggest (nine concerts compared with previous years’ six) and the most musically wide-ranging. In the greatest possible contrast, the final concert on Sunday, October 19, will be given by Los Angeles’ all- female Mariachi band, Mariachi Lindas Mexicanas.

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100-Inch Telescope Dome, Mount Wilson Observatory, Sunday 5 October 2025,
3 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Images: The performance: Taavi Sirota; Jonah Sirota, Jonathan Flaksman: artists' websites; Hans Gál: composer website; Micah Wright: Pasadena Conservatory of Music; Kyle Gilner: Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; Gigi Brady: Pasadena Symphony and Pops; Prokofiev and Stravinsky: Legendary Musicians/Facebook; Geoff Osika, Cécilia Tsan: Long Beach Symphony.

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A Tour of Piano Trios to Open the SBCMS Season

The Elixir Piano Trio: l-r Fang Fang Xu, cello; Samvel Chilingarian, violin; Lucy Nargizyan, piano.

REVIEW

Elixir Piano Trio, South Bay Chamber Music Society, Pacific Unitarian Church, Rancho Palos Verdes

DAVID J BROWN

Amongst the LA area’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of highly-skilled, professional chamber music ensembles, the Elixir Piano Trio (Samvel Chilingarian, violin; Fang Fang Xu, cello; Lucy Nargizyan, piano) seems to have passed me by—and to my loss, judging by their program for the first concert of the South Bay Chamber Music Society’s 63rd season, as ever under the Artistic Directorship of Robert Thies.

Drawing of Mozart in silverpoint, April 1989.

This amounted to a chronological mini-conspectus of the piano trio genre from the late 18th to the mid-20th century, but one that neatly side-stepped its most celebrated 19th century (male) names. The Elixirs began with Mozart, and the fifth of his six numbered trios. Composed in summer 1788 at around the same time as his last three symphonies, this Trio in C major, K. 548, despite the key signature’s cheerful implications and its opening measures resemblng a familiar jaunty phrase from an aria in The Marriage of Figaro, is emotionally unsettled and ambiguous.

The first movement exposition is bright-eyed and perky enough, but the development plunges into the minor, and in this performance the tendency to darkness was emphasized both by the Elixir Trio’s trenchant dynamic accentuation and their omission of the repeat. Indeed, the lack of repeats throughout made the work, at a tight, 16-minute whole, seem a very different animal compared with, say, one British period instrument recording where the inclusion of every repeat stretches it to nearly half-an-hour.

Clara Schumann in 1850.

The Elixirs’ dramatic drive was maintained in the next item, written more than half a century after the Mozart. Clara Schumann’s Trio in C minor, Op. 17, from 1846 bids fair to be regarded as the magnum opus in her slender output. Though it follows the familiar four-movement pattern of sonata-design opener, scherzo-and-trio, slow movement, and fast finale, there’s no sense of this being by rote. Rather, it seems the natural home for Schumann’s inspiration.

A long-breathed first subject shared between all three instruments, punctuated by a peremptory fortissimo figure, leads to the exposition's well-contrasted and rhythmically unpredictable second theme. Again the Elixirs did not observe the exposition repeat—and though this was in some ways regrettable, it did serve to emphasize the dramatic thrust of their interpretation, as they dug straight on into the development’s tensile pile-up of overlapping figures, before the lead-back to a full recapitulation.

By contrast, they took a relaxed view of the tempo di menuetto Scherzo—delightfully tripping in ländler-ish contrast to the serious first movement—and gave equal measure to the wistfully lingering Trio, before the Scherzo’s return. All three players relished the beauties of the Andante, beginning with the songful main theme, introduced on the piano and then passed successively to the violin and the cello. The Allegretto finale revisits the first movement’s vigor, and the Elixir Trio skillfully elucidated Clara Schumann’s teeming invention through to the dramatic end.

Rachmaninoff in 1892.

After the interval, they moved on another half-century or thereabouts to the one-movement Trio élégiaque No. 1 in G minor, composed in 1892 by Sergei Rachmaninoff when he was still under 19 years of age. Here they responded as expansively to his late-Romantic Slavic melancholy as they had tightly delineated Mozart’s and Schumann’s Classical structures in the first half, but with the caveat as usual with this piece that it sounds like the first movement of a larger whole—in other words, leaving one wanting more!

Gayane Chebotaryan.

A further leap of half a century brought us to another single-movement piano trio, this time from Western Asia, and written by a composer who few present, surely, would have heard of. Gayane Chebotaryan (1918-1998) was born and died in Russia, but spent most of her working life in her native Armenia, where she achieved considerable recognition. In the Elixirs’ idiomatic and committed account of her Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello (1945), strains of folk melodies and rhythms certainly brought to mind her more famous countrymen Khatchaturian and Babajanian, and left one wondering if her other works are as immediately engaging.

Astor Piazzolla.

The final temporal jump, this time just a quarter-century, also swung us half-way around the world to Argentina and Astor Piazzolla. His Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (Four Seasons of Buenos Aires), written between 1965 and 1969, seem to be getting almost as ubiquitous, both collectively and individually, as Vivaldi’s Venetian original, and comparably in as many arrangements.

The otherwise excellent (but sadly online-only) program notes by Saagar Asnani of UC Berkeley did not reveal whether the piano trio line-up for Otoño Porteño (Buenos Aires autumn) (1969) was Piazzolla’s own or by another hand. Either way, it can rarely have sounded as haunting and rhapsodic as this performance, led by Fang Fang Xu’s eloquent cello. 

 … and there was an encore: more Piazzolla, and one of his greatest hits—Oblivion, to really sound out the depths of Latinate melancholy, and to the huge appreciation of the South Bay audience. 

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South Bay Chamber Music Society, LA Harbor College 8:00p.m./Pacific Unitarian Church 3:00p.m., Friday/Sunday, 19/21 September, 2025.

Images: Elixir Trio: artists' website; Mozart, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Piazzolla: Wikimedia Commons; Chebotaryan: Armenian National Music; the performance: author.

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Celebrating LA From Mount Wilson’s Vantage Point

The lights of Los Angeles glow against the night sky from the vantage point of the “monastery,”
the astronomers’ accommodation at Mount Wilson Observatory.

REVIEW

The Zelter String Quartet play Todd Mason and Beethoven

DAVID J BROWN

I was particularly sorry to have missed the July event in this summer’s bumper season of Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome at Mount Wilson Observatory (season preview here). Some of LA’s finest musicians, led by cellist Cécilia Tsan, Artistic Director of the series and joint mastermind behind it in tandem with Mount Wilson Trustee Dan Kohne, had been joined—in a program of Schumann, Beethoven, and John Williams—by the astronaut violinist Sarah Gillis on the 56th anniversary of the first Moon landing.

However, if that concert had its focus firmly upwards, not only towards the Moon but also the recent Polaris Dawn mission in which Ms. Gillis memorably played “Rey’s Theme” from Wlliams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens score accompanied by groups of musicians electronically linked from around the world, then the most recent, on the first Sunday in August, could be said to have turned its gaze, at least for part of the time, downward to the city spread out on the plain nearly a mile below the Observatory’s mountain fastness.

City of Angels, a homage by LA composer Todd Mason (left) to the city of his birth and present domicile, has had a slightly complicated history. Originally conceived as his Fourth String Quartet, Mason’s reworking for string orchestra (which can be heard on YouTube) acquired the title City of Angels. At Mount Wilson the latest version of the quartet, into which he carried over those minor revisions as well as the title, received its world premiere by the Zelter String Quartet (Kyle Gilner and Gallia Kastner, violins; Carson Rick, viola; and Allan Hon, cello).

Individually and collectively these marvelous young musicians are familiar both at Mount Wilson (LA Opus review here) and at other local chamber music venues, including Mason’s own House Concerts, and judging by that previous Mount Wilson premiere—of his String Quartet No. 3—and the present performance, they are at once au fait with the idiom and up to its considerable technical challenges.

In contrast to Quartet No. 3’s extensive single-movement structure, City of Angels is in three separate movements representing aspects of Los Angeles: Restless City, Dream City, and Irrepressible City. Rather than the overall “fast / slow / fast” arrangement one might expect, “slow(ish) / slow / (very) fast” overall describes their pacing more accurately; tellingly though, Mason’s own indications—Pensive, Expressive, and Festive & Fast!—say more about mood than motion alone.

Restless City certainly is just that, but the Zelters proved themselves masters of its twists and turns: constant changes of time signature, abrupt loud/soft, soft/loud dynamic switches, and sudden rapid-fire attacks and intervallic leaps, though perhaps its most ear-catching feature is the frequent slurring from one dissonant chord to another, which could well be heard as a musical metaphor for the treacherously unstable ground upon which LA is built.

With the four instruments muted throughout, Dream City could also have been headed Pensive, and at this movement’s opening Mason affords each player an opportunity to shine, with eloquent, slow-moving solos seamlessly handed forward one to the next: in particular 1st violin Gallia Kastner added some wonderfully expressive nuance here. Textures thicken and the music rises to brief forte climaxes, but the somewhat bleak introspection is never far away before the music settles to a final long-held chord of rare warmth.

Irrepressible City is a concise rondo, played here with whiplash fervor by the Zelters. Recurrences of its punchy opening section are punctuated by brief returns to the inquietude of the earlier movements, and this finale is also permeated throughout by the metrical restlessness that particularly characterized the first movement though was also present in the second, if less marked there due to the slower speeds.

If I have a concern, it’s that the City of Angels title could be taken to signal a more lightweight, illustrative piece than it actually is—just a sidebar to an increasingly impressive sequence of numbered string quartets (Mason has already complete the Fifth, likely to be heard in his House Concerts next year). But no breezy travelogue, this intricately wrought and intensely thought-through quartet is a worthy companion to its predecessors. Maybe the warmer, more upholstered timbres of the string orchestra version lend themselves better to the title.

"Beethoven nears the end," by Oswald Charles Barrett.

Either way, it says a lot for the technical mastery and expressive fervor of Mason’s quartet that it felt neither dwarfed nor sidelined when preceding one by the greatest exponent of the medium who ever lived.

Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 12 in E-flat major, Op. 127, the first of the four mighty works that embodied his ever more original explorations during 1825 and 1826, is outwardly the most conventionally assembled of them, being in the usual four movements as opposed to, successively, the five, six, and seven of Quartets Nos. 15 in A minor, Op. 132, 13 in B-flat major, Op. 133, and 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131.

The trenchant Maestoso chords with which the first movement begins certainly sound like a grand portal opening onto a new expressive world, but what follows is anything but portentous. Beethoven promptly sideslips to an amiable little tune that introduces an elegant, economical, and slyly subversive take on the sonata design that in many previous works he had exploited with unprecedented structural resourcefulness and expressive power. At its pianissimo wisp of a close, after barely seven minutes, he leaves us still wondering what kind of a work this is.

But the theme-and-variations slow movement that follows is as expansive as the first was concise, and here the Zelters gave it all the expressive space that it needs, just as they had bodied forth so expertly the quicksilver twists and turns of its predecessor. The Vivace scherzo and the poundingly vigorous Finale both had all the requisite energy, but without compromising clarity even within the exceptionally resonant acoustic of the 100-inch telescope Dome. As with the Mason, the quartet played Beethoven's ever-challenging masterpiece (Gallia Kastner and Kyle Gilner here swapping their 1st/2nd violin roles) with all the expressive nuance it needs, as well as consummately tight rhythmic unity.

It was a pity, I thought, to omit the long second-half repeat in the scherzo, not only reducing the movement’s scale but rather deflating Beethoven’s joke at the end, where for a handful of Presto measures he seems about to bring back the pell-mell Trio section yet again (a trick he’d previously played in the scherzos of the Seventh and Ninth Symphonies), but it didn’t detract from the performance’s impact as the response of the audience made clear, many of whom doubtless were experiencing the magic of this unique venue for the first time.

Brief extracts from this concert can be enjoyed on YouTube here. The next in this season takes place on Sunday, August 19 with, as usual, two performances at 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. Cécilia Tsan will be joined by Evan Price (violin), Roch Lockyer (guitar and vocals), Zach Dellinger (viola), and Brian Netzley (bass) in a tribute to the violinist Ben Powell, who played in the very first concert of Mount Wilson's inaugural 2017 season, but died at the tragically young age of 38 in 2024.

 

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100-Inch Telescope Dome, Mount Wilson Observatory, Sunday 8 August 2025, 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Images: LA at night: author; The performance: Todd Mason; Beethoven: Oxford Companion to Music.

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“Cellissimo” at Mount Wilson

REVIEW

Cécilia Tsan and Allan Hon play Barrière, Bach, Gernot Wolfgang, and Offenbach, Mount Wilson Observatory

DAVID J BROWN

Two eminently listenable three-movement suites by French composers, one Baroque and one Romantic, book-ending an acknowledged masterwork and a world premiere, plus a much-loved encore, and all in a unique venue… what’s not to love? And lest anyone think that adjective to be unwonted hyperbole, has any other observatory in the world repurposed a telescope dome as a concert hall, besides its existing function?

From tentative beginnings in 2017, the summer seasons of Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome at Mount Wilson have gone from strength to strength (always excepting the “covid year” of 2020), and for 2025 there are more, and more varied, concerts than any previous year, masterminded as ever by Artistic Director Cécilia Tsan and Mount Wilson Institute Trustee Dan Kohne.

So on the last Sunday in June a capacity audience, a good half being first-timers, seated itself on the platform that surrounds the 100-inch Hooker telescope for this season’s first classical concert. Dan Kohne set the scene, noting that this day, June 29, was the 157th birth anniversary of the observatory’s founder George Ellery Hale—and then there was the ever-memorable engineering spectacle: the dome’s giant observation shutter slowly cranking open far overhead, and the whole structure rotating around the stationary telescope (the machinery still operating perfectly in its 108th year), carrying the audience and performing platform into position for ample light without direct glare.

If one word could sum up the performances by Cécilia Tsan and Allan Hon, respectively Principal and Assistant Principal Cello with the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, that word would be “generosity”—not only in how they listened to and responded to each other through the many opportunities for give-and-take that the music enabled, but also in the spacious tempi that the dome’s resonant acoustic tends to require.

Jean-Baptiste Barrière.

Both the initial Andante (with its first half repeat exquisitely hushed) and the Prestissimo finale of the Sonata No. 10 in G major of Jean-Baptiste Barrière (1707-1747) were notably more relaxed than some performances to be found on YouTube. Though famous in his day as a virtuoso cellist, Barrière was not a prolific composer, with just four collections of cello sonatas to his name plus a handful of other pieces. Today his works seem little-known, judging by his sparse representation in current CD listings, but this performance showed that we’re missing something: the two-minute central Adagio, in particular, was a perfect miniature of soulful, galante introspection.

Jacques Offenbach, c.1850.

The output of Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) was at the opposite extreme. Before he embarked upon his nearly 100 operettas he had a whole first career as almost as prolific a composer for the cello and as a virtuoso on the instrument—a recent complete recording of just his cello duos extends to seven well-filled CDs. The last item on Tsan and Hon’s “Cellissimo” program was Offenbach's Duo Op. 51, No. 1, and if the literally dozens of others are anything like as charmingly varied and tuneful as the three movements of this one, then they also need to be brought into the light!

Gernot Wolfgang.

Local SoCal resident Gernot Wolfgang (b. 1957) originally wrote his Ready to Rumble! in 2019 for two contrabassoons, but this was the first performance in his new arrangement for two cellos. If it lost some of the pawky rudeness of the original (cf. YouTube) in its jazzy, off-kilter rhythmic elements, then in the hands of Tsan and Hon it gained lyrical warmth in the slower, more ruminative sections.

Ready to Rumble! in its cello duet version was a fun jeu d’esprit, and clearly enjoyed by audience and players. However, it had the misfortune to follow—as would have been the case for just about any work—a piece that's not only a supreme creation for the instrument for which it was originally conceived but also what has been called one of the greatest achievements of humanity in any medium.

J. S. Bach, c.1720, around the time of
the composition of his Partita No. 2.

This was  the Ciaconna fifth movement of J. S. Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin, BWV 1004. Nonetheless—though it may be sacrilegious to say it—for this listener at least the sense of sheer strain in almost any violinist performing the Ciaconna tends to militate against reacting to the piece as an emotional experience besides its impact as a tour de force of ingenuity and execution. But this was almost shockingly not the case with the cello duo arrangement by Claudio Jaffe and Johanne Perron as played by Cécilia Tsan and Allan Hon.

With the music’s elaborate strands separated out, clarified, and judiciously shared between the two instruments, plus their deep, rich sonorities, and together with the masterfully judged pacing and subtle rubato of the whole, Tsan and Hon delivered a powerfully expressive account shorn of any distracting effortfulness. To take just one instance of their control and shaping, the careful broadening and emphasis at the Ciaconna’s mid-point when Bach brings us back to the opening theme made the moment extraordinarily powerful and moving. It seemed to say “this is where we came from, but though we have come far, there is still so much more…” They delivered.

Finally, there was that much-loved encore piece, Ennio Morricone’s radiantly sentimental main theme from Cinema Paradiso, played from the heart by Tsan and Hon. Under its spell it was easy for the cinematic mind’s eye to see the movie’s concluding montage of romantic clips (click here or on the image above)— spliced together in secret by the old projectionist Alfredo—as flickering shadows against the steel panels, struts and beams of Hale’s great dome—truly a Coelestium Paradiso.

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100-Inch Telescope Dome, Mount Wilson Observatory, Sunday 29 June 2025, 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Photos: The performance: Todd Mason; Barrière: IMSLP; Offenbach and Bach: Wikimedia Commons; Gernot Wolfgang: Composer website; Cinema Paradiso clip: YouTube.

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Long Beach Symphony’s “Love Stories” Season Finale

Eckart Preu, Music Director of the Long Beach Symphony, backstage at the Terrace Theater with some of the dancers from the Modern Apsara Company.

REVIEW

Long Beach Symphony, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach

DAVID J BROWN

A crash course in a few of the hand gestures integral to Cambodian dance isn’t perhaps the first thing you’d expect in a pre-concert talk but, as delivered by Mea Lath, founder and director of the Modern Apsara Company of Long Beach (not coincidentally home to the country’s largest Cambodian community, indeed the largest outside South-East Asia), this was just part of the more-than-usually-packed half-hour preamble to the LBSO’s ambitious and colorful 90th anniversary season finale, hosted as ever by Music Director Eckart Preu.

And truly colorful the opening item was: the gorgeously-clad Modern Apsara dancers (above and below) enacted Sovann Macha and Hanuman, an excerpt from the Reamker, a version of the Sanskrit Ramayana that now forms the Cambodian national epic. Ms. Lath’s insight into this one aspect of Cambodia’s two millennia-long cultural history aptly aided understanding of the dancers’ meticulously controlled and hypnotically slow movements.

They were accompanied by the locally-based Master Ho Pin Peat Ensemble, plus discreet orchestral underpinning as arranged by Hans-Peter Preu. In a second facet of the pre-concert presentation, the Cambodian composer Chinary Ung (b. 1942)—whose own work was next on the program—had joined Ms. Lath and Maestro Preu to introduce the players, their traditional instruments, and the music itself: sonorously repetitive, dominated by the sound of deep-toned xylophones, and together with the dance bringing a brief and enigmatically impressive glimpse into a performance art profoundly different from any Western counterpart, if such there be.

Chinary Ung.

Though Ung’s Water Rings Overture (1993) is scored for quite modestly-scaled Western orchestral forces, the confident performance by Preu and the LBSO generated an imposing wall of percussion-flecked sound from within which threads of melody arose, coiled, and dissipated, confirming the impression of a static, even hieratic presence, rather than the purposeful forward movement that “overture” normally implies.

Certainly not outstaying its welcome at under seven minutes, it left this listener with a sense of something impersonal and discovered, rather than composed. The haunting and somehow open-ended quiet close to the Water Rings Overture certainly invited further exploration of Ung’s work.

If the Water Rings Overture represents one filtration of an oriental musical tradition through occidental resources, then The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto, the main work in the concert’s first half, can be regarded as another, and startlingly different, one. It was written in 1959 by two Shanghai Conservatory graduate students, He Zhanhao (b.1933) and Chen Gang (b.1935), who took an ancient Chinese folk tale of forbidden love as the basis for a work combining Chinese and Western musical resources.

Banned during China’s Cultural Revolution, the work resurfaced in 1978 and has become much loved and widely performed there and farther afield (the celebrated Japanese violinist Takako Nishizaki has made no fewer than seven commercial recordings of it!). The soloist for the LBSO performance was the equally celebrated Chinese star Gao Can (below), who personally introduced the work both in the pre-concert presentation and immediately before his performance.

Unless you have a positively diabetic reaction to “sugary pictorialism” (as one sniffy British reviewer characterized it), The Butterfly Lovers’ Violin Concerto is as purely pleasurable as any other work that explores the lyrical resources of the violin (e.g. think Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending). 

After a ppp strings and harp introduction, above which a rapturous flute solo flutters and hovers (perfectly floated here by Principal Heather Clark), the violin was constantly front-and-center throughout the work’s remaining 25 minutes, and Gao Can’s playing ran the gamut from exquisite musings on the very edge of audibility to vigorous passage-work, taking in a soulful duet with Principal cellist Cécilia Tsan in the third of the work’s eight continuous sections.

The title “concerto” is indeed somewhat of a misnomer, as the piece is much more a symphonic poem with soloist telling a detailed narrative. Indeed it’s possible to imagine a performance with appropriate visuals and surtitles to keep the audience up to speed on the story. Without any of this, however, and with soloist, orchestra and conductor clearly enjoying thoroughly their collaboration, The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto was a big hit with the Long Beach audience, and Gao Can’s performance of it was cheered to the roof.

Tchaikovsky in 1877, the year he began
work on the Fourth Symphony.

After the interval it was back to the Western symphonic canon heartland with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (1877-78), an obvious choice as it was both the work which concluded, 90 years previously to the day, the LBSO’s inaugural season in 1935, and the piece that Eckart Preu chose to conduct in his 2016 audition concert that won him the his Musical Directorship of the orchestra.

In remarks before the present performance he emphasized, understandably, the emotional turmoil Tchaikovsky was in when he wrote his Fourth Symphony, and the consequent expressive extremes that it embodies, but it is also a marvelously constructed work, a consummately fruitful interplay of impulse and craft. Indeed there’s a case to be made for the first movement—nearly as long as its three successors put together—to be regarded as the finest single symphonic structure that Tchaikovsky ever composed.

Most essentially a ballet composer, and a master at creating long, memorable melodies that don’t necessarily lend themselves to Beethovenian-style motivic development, Tchaikovsky nonetheless in this movement builds from just such elements a coherent and towering edifice that never feels forced or in danger of coming apart at the seams, despite extremes of dynamic, pace, and texture. All this was reinforced in a performance as skillfully paced and balanced in terms of both instrumental voices and control of tension and release as anyone could desire.

The Moscow Conservatory
student Antonina Miliukova:
Tchaikovsky's marriage to her
precipitated the composer’s
breakdown—the background
against which the Fourth
Symphony was composed.

As one example, the clarinet+bassoon link between the opening “Fate” fanfare and the first main theme (Tchaikovsky the ballet composer marks it In movimento di Valse) had just the right combination of hesitancy and anticipation, qualities that equally applied to the subtly applied ritardandi in the long winding down of tension, again carried by clarinet and bassoon, between the exposition’s hammering final statement of the main theme and the long-delayed emergence of the second subject, Moderato assai, quasi Andante, introduced by Principal Michael Yoshimi’s clarinet with just the right degree of lugubrious jauntiness.

As for Maestro Preu’s exemplary control of textural balance, one example that stood out among many was the nominal start of the recapitulation when the upper strings reintroduce the main subject over a timpani onslaught—all the parts are marked fff but where some conductors allow the timpani to drown out the strings, here the torrential cascade of the melody itself clearly penetrated despite timpanist Gary Long giving his considerable all.

Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky’s
wealthy patroness from 1877 onwards:
though they never met, their epistolary
relationship helped sustain the composer
while he was writing what he called “our
symphony,” which he dedicated to her.

The middle movements are simple ABA structures, contrasting both with the far-flung complexities of the first movement and with each other in terms of pace, scoring, and emotional character. Maestro Preu kept them moving, but at the opening of the Andantino in modo di canzona allowed room for Principal oboist Rong Huey Liu’s long solo to achieve the required plaintive melancholy, while in the scherzo the full strings showed no signs of raggedness in their long passages of rapid unison pizzicati.

The Finale’s opening lacked nothing in crash-bash excitement, giving way to thrillingly unanimous string figuration and whiplash exchanges with the wind band, so that the whole build-up to the central re-emergence of the first movement’s “Fate” motif felt hectically perilous.

But Tchaikovsky’s addition here of cymbals and bass drum gives it a showy theatricality that rather undermines the motif’s previous gaunt menace, and after the ritenuto, carefully controlled by Maestro Preu, where Tchaikovsky compresses the texture and dynamic down to cellos and basses, piano, he gave the orchestra its head in an audience-galvanizing rush to the finish.

Maestro Preu and the LBSO rehearsing Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. 

It’s difficult to conceive a more fitting and dynamic conclusion to this celebratory season, and as Maestro Preu also noted in that packed pre-concert presentation, the “Love Stories” theme extended to fond farewells to three retiring members of the orchestra, Julie Feves (Principal bassoon), Paul Castillo (2nd clarinet), and Victoria Bacon (cello), each with over 40 years’ service to their credit.

Also moving on was Assistant Conductor Pola Benke (left) to a comparable role at the Pacific Symphony, and notably to her new post as Music Director of the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra. Congratulations to her, and welcome to Emmanuel Rojas, the LBSO’s new Conducting Fellow!

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Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach, Saturday, June 7, 2025, 7.30 p.m.

Images: The performance: Issy Faris, Long Beach Symphony; Chinary Ung: wmft.com; He Zhanhoa and Chen Gang: musicbookslit.com; Gao Can: China Daily; Tchaikovsky, Antonina Miliukova, Nadezhda von Mech: Wikimedia Commons.

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“Cathedrals of Sound” Revisited at Costa Mesa

Organist Paul Jacobs at the William J. Gillespie Concert Organ in the Segerstrom Hall for his performance of Guilmant’s Symphony No. 1 with the Pacific Symphony in their May
“Cathedrals of Sound” concert.

REVIEW

Pacific Symphony Orchestra, Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Costa Mesa

DAVID J BROWN

In some opening remarks from the podium, Pacific Symphony Music Director Carl St.Clair (left) noted that this was the third program entitled “Cathedrals of Sound.” Maybe the first predated my move to southern California, or I missed an interim, but the only previous one I recall was well over seven years ago (reviewed here). Then, as on the present occasion, it was enhanced by an opening selection of Gregorian chant by the Norbertine Fathers of St. Michael’s Abbey, Silverado, CA, before the main (indeed only) work, Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony.

That performance clearly showed Maestro St.Clair’s love for and affinity with the Austrian master’s music, but given the considerable time interval between then and the account of the Symphony No. 7 in E major WAB 107 (1881-83, rev. 1885) which filled most of the present concert, it seems unlikely that we will eventually be able to enjoy a complete Bruckner symphony cycle under his baton. That is a great pity, as this account of the Seventh largely reaffirmed the virtues of St.Clair’s approach—mostly spacious but carefully integrated tempi that emphasized the music’s through line rather than disjunction between Bruckner’s great blocks of sound, and acute sensitivity to instrumental color, contrast and balance.

Anton Bruckner in 1885
(portrait by Hermann von Kaulbach).

In other remarks at the start of the second half, immediately before the performance of the symphony, St.Clair alerted the audience to the need for patience: Bruckner does not reach out and seize the emotions; you have to go to him. He also noted the composer’s devotion to the organ, but in so doing perhaps did an unintentional disservice by the implicit notion that his style of scoring was basically a transfer of organ to orchestra.

Bruckner symphonies have been transcribed for organ, but rarely convincingly because these works are conceived in terms of orchestral, not organ, sonorities—in the contrasted timbres of individual instruments, their endless range of combinations, and the full tutti sound.

Ironically, perhaps, the superb Segerstrom Hall acoustic itself underlined this truth at every point in the Pacific Symphony’s account of the Seventh Symphony. This was clear at the very outset of the opening Allegro moderato, where after two measures of pp tremolandi in the 1st and 2nd violins—a barely audible but exquisite shimmer of sound under St.Clair’s baton—the indelibly memorable first theme ascended at just the right mezzo-forte in the cellos, partnered by a solo horn, more than usually distinct, to give the extra edge of aspiring nobility.

This theme arches majestically over a full 21 measures, and is immediately repeated in its entirety with winds and then brass added to the orchestral mix—Bruckner leaving no doubt as to the scale on which he conceives the movement. St.Clair’s masterly pacing of this opening extended through the more reflective second theme, then the positively skittish third motif, and then their long and inspired working out. His approach—steadily confident in the composer’s mastery of form and balance—recalled that of the late Jascha Horenstein, and extended all the way to the glorious conclusion where, over more than 50 measures of a gradual timpani crescendo (the only drum incursion in the whole movement), the hall filled with wave on wave of burnished tone from the whole Pacific Symphony at the top of its game.

The Adagio of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony reaches its climax.

The great Adagio was equally fine, weighty but still trenchant at St.Clair’s faithful observation of Bruckner’s Sehr feirlich und langsam (very solemn and slow) marking, with the golden-gravel sonorities of the four Wagner tubas that Bruckner introduced here for the first time in a non-operatic context immediately grounding the movement’s sound-world. At the mountain-top climax some 18 minutes in, the sometimes-disputed extra percussion were blessedly present—indeed this was the first time I’d seen a second triangle (one player, two hands) deployed at that moment, with literally ringing effect.

It’s often posited that there’s no one right way to interpret great music, and that’s certainly true of Bruckner’s Seventh. Equally though, different approaches bring different challenges, and at this point in the performance—half-way in terms of the number of movements but two-thirds in total duration—a smidgeon of doubt began to creep in. The Seventh is unique amongst his symphonies in that it comprises two very spacious movements followed by two much quicker and shorter ones. So how, given that we’ve already heard some of the grandest music in the orchestral repertoire, to avoid a sense of anti-climax, particularly at the very end, where Bruckner doesn't try to top his majestic close to the first movement?

A couple of years ago I enjoyed a very different account of the work from Philippe Jordan and the LAPO (reviewed here). After somewhat but not hugely quicker movements I and II (totaling around 41 minutes compared with St.Clair’s 45), Jordan took the scherzo at quite a lick, following the Sehr schnell (very fast) marking, and then proceeded onto the finale with barely a breath’s pause (though the score has no attacca indication). St.Clair, by contrast, continued the weightiness of the first two movements, giving the scherzo section itself a steady inexorability but maintaining a sense of forward movement in the trio so that when the scherzo returned the cumulative effect of the whole was an immensely powerful unity, accentuated by the Pacific Symphony’s playing.

As for the finale, St.Clair followed Bruckner’s Bewegt, doch nicht schnell (Moving, but not fast) marking at the start, but this movement, very subtly constructed and diverse in terms of pace and dynamic, somehow didn't quite take off and build with the needed sense of inevitability to its conclusion. Where M. Jordan kept the whole thing airborne right up to a crisply delivered final cadence that sidestepped the built-in problem of Bruckner’s simply not scoring it as the crowning moment of the symphony, here the sense of wearisome repetitiveness that can lurk in the background with this composer wasn't entirely avoided, and when that final climax did arrive, the hesitant initial applause showed that it hadn’t overcome the all-too-familiar “Is that actually the end?” audience response (though to be fair, it rapidly grew into a deserved ovation).

The Norbertine Fathers of St Michael's Abbey.

The program’s opening had been subject to late alteration, as readers of the booklet wondering why they weren’t listening to the promised Sinfonia in D major, BWV 1045 of J. S. Bach rapidly realized. In his opening remarks, Maestro St.Clair announced that the concert would be in remembrance of both the late William Gillespie, whose generosity had enabled building of the William J. Gillespie Concert Organ that we would hear played by Paul Jacobs, and of another generous Pacific Symphony donor, Elizabeth Stahr, who had died very recently.

The Norbertine Fathers  began with the Requiem Aeternam Introit, and then followed a radiant account from the full Pacific Symphony strings of the “Air on the G string” from Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068—a far cry from the trumpet-topped jubilation and virtuosic solo violin of the extensive Sinfonia originally programmed—in turn succeeded by two more Gregorian chants from the Fathers, Requiem Aeternam Gradual and Lux Aeterna. The audience observed Carl St.Clair’s request that they refrain from applauding this whole opening section of the concert (a sensitive and devoted response that was in marked contrast to the persistent loud chatter beyond the circle of listeners that had marred the Norbertine Fathers’ earlier presentation in the foyer, below).

The main work in the first half was the Symphony No. 1, Op. 42 (1874) for organ and orchestra by Alexandre Guilmant (1837-1911), one of the illustrious roster of 19th century French organist-composers that also included Charles-Marie Widor, Louis Vierne, and Charles Tournemire. As with Widor’s own Symphonie pour orgue et orchestre, Op. 42, drawn from two of his solo organ symphonies, both of Guilmant’s were adapted from organ sonatas, Nos. 1 and 8 respectively, and in this performance his First Symphony made an assertive impression.

Alexandre Guiilmant

A little like the opening of Berlioz’s Te Deum, Guilmant begins with dramatic alternations between fortissimo organ and orchestra—the mighty Gillespie instrument under Paul Jacobs’ hands (and feet!) and the Pacific Symphony the perfect match for each other. After this 19-measure introduction, the main body of the movement ensues with an energetic main theme on organ pedals only, duly taken up by the orchestra, and then proceeds to a more lyrical second subject. All is developed and recapitulated, judiciously apportioned between organ and orchestra, and concludes resplendently.

A long lyrical theme infuses the aptly-named Pastorale second movement, exquisitely rendered initially by Paul Jacobs on (presumably) the flute stop specified by the composer, and then taken up by the orchestral winds, horns, and strings. The Allegro assai finale returns to spectacular confrontations and collaborations between the soloist and the whole orchestra, building up to a roof-raising conclusion with bass drum and cymbals reinforcing the tumult.

At a trim 23 minutes, Guilmant’s First Symphony was a concise, welcome, unhackneyed, and untrendy choice of companion to the Bruckner. While breaking no new ground structurally or harmonically, it is as tuneful and immediately enjoyable as anyone could desire, and Paul Jacobs, Carl St.Clair and the Pacific Symphony clearly relished working together in their exuberant performance. It would be splendid if at some future time they could reunite in Guilmant’s Second Symphony or the Widor Symphonie, or indeed explore further afield in the rich organ+orchestra repertoire.

Paul Jacobs acknowledges the ovation after his 
encore performance of Bach's Fugue in A minor.

Even this was not the end of a first half that was far more extensive than you usually get with a Bruckner symphony. Paul Jacobs returned to the organ loft for a substantial and virtuosic encore, the complete Fugue from J. S. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543, the spectacular conclusion of which included a passage of rapid pedal-work by Jacobs’ hard-working (and clearly visible) feet that brought the audience en masse to theirs. 

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Pacific Symphony Orchestra, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa, Thursday, May 15, 2025, 8 p.m. 

Images: The performers: Doug Gifford; Bruckner and Guiilmant: Wikimedia Commons.