A fabulous, forgotten French symphony pays tribute to Hollywood stars of yesteryear
Los Angeles has a new potentially iconic landmark, architect Michael Maltzan’s 6th Street Viaduct. It opened last weekend. Carolina Miranda, the regular host of this newsletter, has told us all about the boomeranging bridge downtown, at one point “suspending you above the Boyle Heights flats.” And that’s got me, Times classical music critic Mark Swed (filling in this week for the indispensable Miranda), thinking about L.A. icons, people and places, past and present, famous and forgotten.
The eccentric composer Charles Koechlin looked to Hollywood for a rare symphony
An enthralling recording of a little-known symphony written in 1933 by a neglected French composer, Charles Koechlin, has just been released. “The Seven Stars’ Symphony” consists of seven movements, each a portrait of a Hollywood film star. They are, in order, Douglas Fairbanks, Lilian Harvey, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow, Merlène [sic] Dietrich, Emil Jannings and Charlie Chaplin.
Koechlin, who lived from 1867 to 1950 and sported in his later years a fabulous footlong beard, was eccentric in the grand French music tradition of Rameau, Alkan and Satie. He was a brilliantly original orchestrator, admired by none less than Ravel and Debussy, who asked him to orchestra his ballet, “Khamma.” He was adventurous in his harmonies, seductive in his melodies, surprising in his use of form, expansive in his application of music from Asia and elsewhere and insistent in his fascinations.
He liked the early talkies but not their conventional symphonic scores. Returning from the cinema, he was apt to sit down and write his own scores to whatever film he had just seen. “The Blue Angel,” starring Dietrich and Jannings, got him hooked. But it was Lilian Harvey who most entranced Harvey, and he wrote around 100 pieces for her, which was said to alarm the actress.
In “The Seven Stars’ Symphony,” each star gets a different kind of orchestral treatment. Curiously, the Harvey movement is the slightest, based on a wistful tune in the winds, but it is no slight to Koechlin’s endearment toward her, ending in exquisite sweetness. The Garbo movement opens with the sounds of the otherworldly ondes Martenot, a kind of French theremin with a keyboard. “Clara Bow et la joyeuse Californie” is delightfully beachy and buoyant. Both Dietrich and Chaplin are represented by variations on their names as spelled out in notes. Chaplin’s movement is the symphony’s longest, most complex and most impressive, an extraordinary probing portrayal of the Little Tramp as a serious as well as antic artist.
There have been efforts over the years to attract significant attention to Koechlin. They’ve failed. Earlier recordings of “Seven Stars’,” by little-known conductors and orchestras, attracted only cult followings. The latest comes from Switzerland’s Basel Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ariane Matiakh on the Capriccio label, again seemingly outside the mainstream.
This time the performance is as colorful and charismatic as the subject matter, and the recorded sound is equally stellar. Besides Basel, the city that has done the most for Koechlin is Stuttgart. The city’s radio station, SWR, which in good German fashion supports a first-rate orchestra, has recorded seven excellent CDs’ worth of Koechlin’s orchestral music (particularly from his series of pieces based on Kipling’s “The Jungle Book,” another Koechlin obsession) led by Heinz Holliger. SWR Classic has also released a seven-CD set of Koechlin’s chamber music (he liked the clarinet and flute an awful lot), some of it slight and some of it extraordinary. But this is just the tip of the Koechlin iceberg.
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Garbo, Jannings and Chaplin (to say nothing of Johnny Weissmuller, famous for playing Tarzan) happened to be among the stars who hung out with the German émigré novelist and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann during his L.A. years, and they find their way into “Thomas Mann’s Los Angeles: Stories From Exile 1940-1952.” Edited by the former and current directors of the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, Nikolai Blaumer and Benno Herz, this elegant book, illustrated with stylish drawings and historic photographs, contains a series of short essays on people and places in Mann’s L.A. life. That means film luminaries, writers and musicians as well as architects, the Fox Village Theatre in Westwood, the Shrine Auditorium, the Santa Monica beach.
The characters include the likes of Carl Laemmle, Christopher Isherwood, Arnold Schoenberg, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bertolt Brecht, Otto Klemperer, Richard Neutra, Ernst Lubitsch and Susan Sontag. The superb chronicler of the L.A. art world Lawrence Weschler writes about his grandfather, the composer Ernst Toch, whose 1930 “Geographical Fugue” is sometimes called the first rap work. Taken together, the book’s depictions of people and places produce an extraordinary intellectual history of L.A. of the period. In his assessment of Theodor Adorno, for instance, Alex Ross suggests that it was the powerful films of German émigré director Fritz Lang that contributed to the forbidding German theorist famously disapproving of popular entertainment.
It’s a book of sighs for lost restaurants — the glamorous Brown Derby and the kitschy Max’s Swiss Chalet (now a bland Whole Foods on Wilshire), where the walls had ears. Wouldn’t you have loved to sit next to Mann’s box at the Hollywood Bowl when he shared it with Bruno Walter and Ezio Pinza? You just might discover, as I did, from this treasure-trove of marvelous anecdotes, insights and historical curiosities that you live next door to a modest apartment building once inhabited by a noted émigré.
Some of these same figures turn up in Boris Dralyuk’s new collection, “My Hollywood and Other Poems.” In “Stravinsky at the Farmer’s Market,” Mann and Huxley stroll along the Santa Monica breakers, finding condoms on the beach. Christopher Isherwood swims naked at a party thrown by Austrian actress and screenwriter Salka Viertel in Santa Monica. Schoenberg lobs grapefruits and insults at the wife of novelist Lion Feuchtwanger at the Brentwood Country Mart. Stravinsky lunches at the Farmers Market. Anecdotal or true? I’ve heard some of them before, but Dralyuk, who is editor in chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, gives them a new spin.
On and off the stage
“‘Kinky Boots’ was going about its business Friday night at the Hollywood when a meteor hit the stage and set the musical on fire,” Charles McNulty began his review of the show. “The planetary body,” McNulty then explained, “goes by the name of Wayne Brady.” That meteor, “glamorously kitted out like a cabaret Wonder Woman,” might have been forecast, since McNulty reminds us that Brady is known for his touching portrayal of the cross-dressing Lola on Broadway.
Center Theatre Group, which operates the essential venues the Ahmanson Theatre, Mark Taper Forum and Kirk Douglas Theatre, is in the middle of finding a new leader, as CTG artistic director Michael Ritchie left his role last year. But as McNulty reports, the company has yet to produce a job description for the role, let alone narrow down a list of potential candidates.
“No, Gustave Flaubert isn’t putting the final touches on the prose,” McNulty writes, but the job has been undergoing what is being called a “strategic alignment.” The responsibilities include a number of issues — among them, COVID-19, traffic and parking, creating an inclusive environment on and off the stage, and serving the needs of a diverse audience while not selling out in the process.
Beanie Feldstein‘s replacement in the Broadway revival of “Funny Girl” being announced earlier than expected was the source of much discussion this week, as Lea Michele will take over the role of Fanny Brice starting in September, Ashley Lee reports. How did this happen, exactly? Turns out it was, so say the producers, a friendly handoff.
The museum scene
Deborah Vankin reports that the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles has chosen Amanda Sroka as its new curator. That means that Sroka will be leaving her job as associate curator of contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which Frank Gehry has notably newly renovated, to come to DTLA, where Gehry’s architecture prevails. Even the ICA began life as the Santa Monica Museum of Art as an occupant of the mixed-use center, Edgemar, that Gehry designed on Main Street in Santa Monica.
It also means, however, that Sroka will miss being in Philadelphia when the city’s Barnes Foundation Modigliani exhibition opens in the fall. In preparing to loan the Barnes Modigliani’s “Nude With a Hat,” curators at the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa X-rayed the painting and, to their astonishment, discovered three sketches the artist had painted over.
Meanwhile, a conservator at the National Galleries of Scotland discovered during a routine X-ray scan of Van Gogh’s “Head of a Peasant” a quite different head hidden on the back of the canvas: Van Gogh’s own. This self-portrait had been hidden for a century.
Miranda and Arts Editor Paula Mejía visited East Los Angeles’ Vincent Price Art Museum to discuss the dense, ambitious show “Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art,” which “explores the ways in which Latinx and Latin American artists have examined and engaged sound in their work.” The show, which brings together more than 30 artists, includes displays of gender-bending punk rock by Nervous Gender, a primer on Pauline Oliveros’ treatise on deep listening, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon’s graphic scores, Luz María Sánchez’s chilling rumination on gun violence, a David Bowie-inspired opera put on by Texas high school students, and a mariachi rendition of John Cage’s “Variations II.” The show is up through July 30.
Classical notes
No one thinks of “West Side Story” as iconic L.A., and Steven Spielberg’s recent film is pure New York. In fact, the iconic musical was inspired by a story in The Times about fighting between gangs in San Bernardino (and hence the name Bernardo for one of the lead characters). Gustavo Dudamel, who made his now historic U.S. debut at the Bowl in 2005 and whom Spielberg chose to conduct the soundtrack of his new film, turned the Bowl into the ideal place to see the new film, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic playing the score live before an outdoor screen.
The other L.A. music landmark is, of course, Walt Disney Concert Hall. The L.A. Phil’s music director at the time, Esa-Pekka Salonen, helped open the hall with a memorable performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony, which showed off the new hall’s revelatory acoustics.
Nothing could have been further from DTLA, Disney or the Bowl when Salonen opened the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in France last week conducting the Orchestre de Paris in the “Resurrection” in a grimly abandoned stadium in a suburb of Aix. The performance was staged by the Italian director Romeo Castellucci as a graphic exhumation of a mass grave.
L.A. Phil President and CEO Chad Smith, who was there, has described it as unbelievably moving. The French television station Arte livestreamed the last of the five performances Wednesday and has now archived it, with a warning that it is not suitable for children. Watching close up is horrifying beyond description. But, if you can bear it (I couldn’t at times and was glad not to have been there), Salonen’s inspired performance lifts this “Resurrection” to new spiritual heights.
Essential happenings
Matt Cooper’s weekend picks include Yuval Sharon’s new staging of the third act of Wagner’s “The Valkyries” with bedazzling computer graphics, and two annual favorites: the Outfest film festival and the return of the Hollywood String Quartet’s summer chamber music festival, this time devoted to Beethoven.
Passages
Sad news has taken some of the splendor out of the L.A. Phil’s celebratory Hollywood Bowl season. Tuesday, the first day of the orchestra’s summer Bowl season, the much loved British conductor Bramwell Tovey, who was principal guest conductor of the L.A. Phil from 2008 to 2010 and had appeared regularly at the Bowl since, died the day after his 69th birthday. The cause was a rare form of sarcoma.
Tovey was cherished for his superbly understated musicianship, which never let a listener down, and for a hilarious dry wit that made his spoken introductions at concerts something everyone looked forward to, including the musicians. No music was too light nor too serious for Tovey. He could and did do it all. He was scheduled to conduct the “Tchaikovsky Spectacular” and a Rachmaninoff program at the Bowl next month. He will be greatly missed.
In other news
— The popular, Grammy-winning American soprano Angel Blue, who was scheduled to star in Verdi’s “La Traviata” at the famed Arena di Verona in Italy this summer, has withdrawn in protest to the controversial Russian superstar Anna Netrebko appearing in blackface in the arena’s production of “Aida.”
— Yet another L.A. landmark is in the news. Dodger Stadium is turning 60 and, as The Times’ Jack Harris notes, has never looked better.
— As for Sydney’s Opera House, an architectural landmark to be sure but no acoustical model, the Australian city will reopen its concert hall after a $150-million renovation, and the early reports are that it will finally sound good.
— The Proms has begun. This, the largest international classical summer festival, held in London’s huge Royal Albert Hall, has become increasingly broad in its offering, which now includes, along with the mainstay U.K. and touring orchestras, many pop events. Every single concert is broadcast live on the BBC Radio 3 and archived for a month.
— The latest Omicron surge has begun wreaking havoc with international summer festivals. At the Bayreuth Festival, where a new production of Wagner’s “Ring” is about to be unveiled, conductor Pietari Inkinen, who was set to make his Bayreuth debut, has come down with a serious case of COVID-19, forcing him to cancel. Cornelius Meister, who was to conduct a new production of “Tristan and Isolde,” will take over “The Ring,” while Markus Poschner will substitute for Meister in “Tristan.”
— The Moscow Department of Culture has closed dissident director Kirill Serebrennikov’s Gogol Center, the city’s most progressive theater, which happens to be named for the great Ukrainian writer.
And last but not least ...
The ever tenacious Serebrennikov, who spent two years under house arrest on dubious charges — and still managed to direct and make trouble — has now staged Chekhov’s story “The Black Monk” for the Avignon Festival in France. The astonishing, dystopian production can also be seen on Arte.
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