San Francisco Classical Voice

What a work! It comes on with a whiplash, a fragment of a tune that will rattle 104 times in this first movement, play off against itself in crushing dissonance, break loose and chase itself into cadences in the wrong key. Then comes an even more profound miracle, a slow movement that takes shape as an elegy of intense poignance lit as by a sliver of moonlight through clouds, and then sends those clouds, ever more darkening, like ghosts across the landscape. On one page of his sketches for the work, Beethoven claimed the Tomb Scene from Romeo and Juliet as his inspiration, and it surely fits. Another slow movement from these early years,­ the Largo from the Piano Sonata, Opus 10 No. 3,­ pours forth the same stark, harrowing beauty. These two movements —­ both in the same key, D minor —­ announce the arrival of a master of bone-chilling musical expression such as the world had not yet encountered. People often dismiss everything in Beethoven up to the "Eroica," say, as early, derivative stuff learned at Haydn's knee; this music, however, clearly let's you know that it's later than you think.

We heard Golijov's Yiddishbuk at Ojai last summer, in an edgier, more intense reading by the Cuarteto Latinoamericano; the Philharmonic quartet, led by violinist Mischa Lefkowitz, gave the music a more solemn sense that also worked. This, too, is strange, powerful music; its soul lies in a set of short poems and notations by Franz Kafka inspired by his readings of ancient Hebrew lamentations. Golijov has blended echoes of these long-ago, far-away sources with more contemporary references, from verses by children in Nazi internment to a personal lament for Leonard Bernstein. The music is deep and dark; it cries out, and it also cries out for rehearing.

The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind is better known; the Kronos has recorded it (on Nonesuch) and plays it often. It too is deep and dark, but is so mostly to serve as ground zero for a high-flying solo clarinet that floats over the somber scene like a Chagall ghost. The ecstatic, sometimes manic music of klezmer is a major source here, not the toe-tappers of Fiddler on the Roof but more the wrenching chants that sing of six millennia of Jewish persecution and redemption. Michele Zukovsky's clarinets —­ from soprano to bass — caught the down-and-dirty outcry, verging at times on outright hysteria; the Philharmonic string players, with Mark Kashper leading, followed ecstatically.

At the Music Center the previous weekend, the Philharmonic's Miguel Harth-Bedoya began his stint leading Golijov's Last Round, slithering, biting music from another side of its composer's varied heritage. Its two movements deal with two kinds of tango and, thus, with the exhilaration of the young Golijov under the spell of Astor Piazzolla's playing in Buenos Aires. Two string ensembles play at opposite sides of the stage; at the start the first-desk players play standing up, lunging and kicking into their music and raising goosebumps on their hearers as well. Gradually the music subsides into the politer, social kind of tango. This is large-scale music; it needs a better place on orchestral programs than merely as a 14-minute curtain-raiser. I told Golijov it needs a third movement; he promised to think about it.

Harth-Bedoya grows, in talent and in value to the local orchestra. Surrounding Alicia De Larrocha's rather tired ramble through Manuel de Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain he drew splendid, glinting colors from the orchestra. For his musical strengths as well as his obvious value to the Philharmonic's community, he should be locked behind bars and required to tarry among us. Instead, the world bids for his services the Fort Worth Symphony, most recently. If they ever get around to legalized cloning, he'll be a prime candidate.

Trash comes in many sizes, many grades. At the Philharmonic last week the high-grade trash littered the drab, murky measures of the Brahms First Symphony; the low-grade trash lay amidst the modest charms of the Wieniawski D-minor Violin Concerto. By certain public measurements, the former is generally reckoned as the greater work. By my private measurements, the Wieniawski was infinitely more agreeable. One of its moments, the bridge over which the solo clarinet (Zukovsky, again) transports us from the first to the second movement is lovelier by far than any moment in the excruciating 45 minutes of pompous oratory by which Brahms secured his foothold in the world of the Romantic symphony.

Emmanuel Krivine conducted an honorable, spirited rendition; the Philharmonic's own Alexander Treger tossed off the concerto as the airy kitsch it truly is. Krivine, a frequent visitor, has been saddled with the two least adventurous programs of the entire Philharmonic season, last week and this; he has been allotted more substantial fare even in his Hollywood Bowl appearances in the past. He deserves as much.

(Alan Rich is the music critic of LA Weekly and the former chief music critic of Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune and Los Angeles Herald Examiner. His recent books include the four volumes of "Play-by-Play" (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, including cd's of complete works) and "American Pioneers" in Phaidon's 20th-Century Composers series.)

©2001 Alan Rich, all rights reserved