Partchworld: The Life, Music, and Legacy of Harry Partch

1. Harry Partch in 1972. (Image from Harry Beglan papers, 1926-1997 (series 12/9/25), Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.)

JOHN SCHNEIDER

John Schneider is a Grammy® Award winning and four-time Grammy® nominated guitarist, composer, author and broadcaster. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics & Music from U.C. Cardiff (UK), music degrees from the University of California and the Royal College of Music (London), and is past-President of the Guitar Foundation of America. Schneider is a specialist in contemporary music, and his The Contemporary Guitar has become the standard text in the field.

2. BloBoy.

California’s Harry Partch (1901-1974) was surely one of America's most colorful composers. Though trained as a concert pianist, his dissatisfaction with the scales and instruments of Western music inspired him to design and build, between 1929 and 1970, an orchestra of over two dozen handcrafted “microtonal” instruments that were tuned to a scale of 43 pitches per octave. With names like Cloud Chamber Bowls, Chromelodeon, Zymo-Xyl (Zi-mock-sil), Gourd Tree and BloBoy (2. right), these fantastic musical creations would not be out of place in a Dr. Seuss book.

From 1931 to 1972, he created one of the most amazing bodies of sensually alluring and emotionally powerful music of the 20th century, writing music drama, dance theater, and multi-media extravaganzas, as well as intimate vocal and chamber music. In today's parlance, Harry Partch is known as an “American Maverick,” a loner whose itinerant wanderings as a hobo and “railroad bum” during the Great Depression are the stuff of legend. His wildly original scores influenced several generations of composers from Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) and György Ligeti (1923-2006) to Tom Waits, David Bowie, and Paul Simon, and still manages to shock, amuse, and amaze.

3. University of Wisconsin
Press, 1949.

He was also a great innovator, being one of the first concert composers to use overdubbing as a composition tool, as well as creating his own indie label in the 1950s, and training his own eponymous ensemble decades before Steve Reich and Philip Glass. He was also the first to use the electric guitar in concert music, and the first to use a fretless instrument.

4. Da Capo Press, 1974.

It long seemed that once Partch died, so would his music. After all, what better way to absolutely guarantee a music’s obsolescence than to compose for a single set of entirely unique instruments in an opaque notation—mostly tablatures—that takes ages to learn, and has no precedence? And yet, against all odds, quite the opposite has happened: Partch’s reputation has only grown since his passing in 1974, becoming what could only be termed as legendary. His work is consistently listed as inspiration for ensuing generations of musicians of all styles, from rock and roll, to punk, to classical.

Luckily, he also painstakingly documented his musical development in recordings, films, writings, and a volume called Genesis of a Music, initially in 1949 then in an expanded and enlarged edition in 1974 (3. & 4. above). During his lifetime, the composer felt compelled to convince other musicians that his vision of a music that was emotionally compelling and acoustically in tune, would offer new sounds, new means of expression, and new possibilities for the future, but to his bitter disappointment, most couldn’t care less.

In the end, it was his performances, films, and the handful of recordings that he so carefully produced and distributed in his own lifetime that won the case for Partch. What a surprise! In what was an era of increasingly abstract music, here was modern music that was corporeal, and actually spoke to people! With rare exceptions, the audiences were far more receptive to the music than the professional musicians of his time. Luckily, those films and recordings are now almost completely available, only increasing the hunger for this unusual music.

5. Harry Partch, 1952.
(Wikimedia Commons). 

But what of performances? Live performances? Nothing, I repeat, nothing replaces being in the room with these wonderful instruments. The music is meant to be experienced, and not just by the ears: “In the right room acoustically, the Marimba Eroica is felt through the feet, against the belly, and, if one sits on the floor, it ripples through his bottom. H. P.” But with only one set of instruments, then residing on the east coast of North America, the chances of having one’s bottom rippled were rather remote.

To fall in love with a piece of music is to want to possess it—to feel it under one’s fingers, to breathe life into it with one’s own breath, or bow, or mallet… that is the musician’s way. I made the mistake of falling in love with Partch’s music with no possible way of consummating my affection. There was nowhere to go to rent or buy the appropriate instruments, no available music, no teachers from whom to learn the scales, techniques and repertoire, nowhere to touch and feel the music except through the loudspeakers of my stereo. 

6. The World of Harry Partch,
Columbia LP album cover.  

It was as if I had heard a recording of J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and—having sworn to learn it—had to build my own harpsichord, teach myself how to read music and the keyboard technique to perform it, let alone the interpretational skills to bring it to life. So I turned to what you might call the “book of Genesis." Partch’s only published volume is not only a history book (telling of the development of intonation and scales since the times of the ancient Greeks), a music theory book (explaining the notation and structure of finely tuned intervals), and an autobiography… it is also a cookbook!

When read closely, Partch’s descriptions of his wonderful instruments include dimensions, materials, and tunings, almost enough information to reproduce them exactly. And so I began with the piece I loved most, on the instrument I knew best: Barstow: Eight Hitchhikers’ Inscriptions (1941) for baritone voice and Adapted Guitar. I had the great fortune to meet Danlee Mitchell, Partch’s longtime assistant and keeper of the instruments at San Diego State University. He gave me a copy of the unpublished manuscript of the piece which I had only known in its last 1968 incarnation for full ensemble, as found on the 1969 Columbia LP album The World of Harry Partch. 

 The music, however, looked like an algebra problem filled with fractions:

It turns out that the composer used the exact ratios of what is known as just intonation to tune pitches exactly. That phrase translates to this (6):

And down the rabbit hole I went. The crazy thing was that back in the early 1990s, no one really knew what the fingerboard of his guitar looked like, and he had never recorded this version of the piece, so I really had no choice but to reverse engineer the fretting using only the notes found in the piece and no others. Years later, it turned out I was right:

7. (above) Adapted Guitar I, 1941 (Barstow, Carmel Pine Cone, Sept 26, 1941, photographer unknown). 8. (above right) Author's copy (photo: Felix Salazar).

He eventually gave up on frets and created his Adapted Guitar II from a Hawaiian style slide guitar, adding four strings, with pitches determined by a lead-weighted plastic rod guided by color-coded triangles painted on the neck:

9. (above) Adapted Guitar II, 1945 (photographer unknown, private collection).
10. (above right) Author’s copy, 2000 (photo: Cat Beers).

By 1941, Partch had also created his own version of the ancient Greek kithara though his was harmonic instead of melodic. Like the modern harp, the original handheld kithara (11. below left) featured a row of single strings tuned from low to high, but Partch’s much larger instrument used 72 strings configured in 12 parallel sets of six strings, each “hexad” tuned to an open chord, almost like a dozen guitars standing in a row, but without their necks.

11-13. The Kithara, Carmel Pine Cone, Sept 19, 1941. (11. Source unknown; 12. Photographer unknown, private collection, 13. Photo: Fred Lyon, used by permission).

15. New Kithara I (1972).

14. Kithara II (1954)
(Photographer unknown,
private collection).

The two hexads at either end rested on thin Pyrex rods that could slide up and down to play chords between the other 10 permanently tuned hexads (13. above right). 

This was the first of the three kitharas that Partch designed, with the later models featuring two more sliding rods either on the outside of the instrument (Kithara II, 1954) or on the middle two sets (New Kithara I, 1972).

Partch retuned many old-fashioned reed organs to his 43-notes-to-the-octave scale, and called these Chromelodeons. The keys were also color-coded to make the fractions (ratios) more immediately recognizable, the final two having 159 pitches (Chromelodeon I, 1949 (16. below left)) while the largest was an 88-key piano case instrument with 244 and three banks of reeds (Chromelodeon II, 1959 (17. below right).

16. Chromelodeon I, 1949.                                           17. Chromelodeon II, 1959.

He also created a new family of marimbas. Two were terraced and chordal (Diamond Marimba (1946 (18. below left)), and Quadrangularis (1965 (19. below right)), while the two Bass Marimbas (1950 (20. bottom left)) and 1954 (21. bottom right)) used single notes from low to high, the latter with resonators so tall that the player must perch on a special stand to reach the gigantic keys.

18. Diamond Marimba.                                           19. Quadrangularis Reversum.

20. Bass Marimba.                                                                21. Marimba Eroica.

22. Zymo-Xyl.

He eventually made six 44-string box zithers called canons, two more guitars, and an amazing array of percussion instruments constructed from bamboo, light bulbs, oversize Pyrex bottles, liquor bottles, hubcaps, artillery shells, with some mixing those elements on a single instrument (Zymo-Xyl (1963 (22. right)) and Spoils of War (1950-65 (23. below left).

23. Spoils of War.

But make no mistake: yes, these are exquisite objets d’art meant to treat both eyes and ears, but most importantly they are the essential tools to create Partch's exquisitely singular music. You simply cannot reproduce his revolutionary vision without them, their inimitable “klang” being the very bedrock of his magnificent musical creations.

After finally hearing the ensemble in San Francisco in 1999, I was hooked—I just had to be able to play this music.

Seattle Symphony’s Season Finale is Transcendent

The Seattle Symphony Orchestra and Chorale perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony under the
baton of Music Director Xian Zhang.

REVIEW

Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Benaroya Hall, Seatle

ERICA MINER

Xian Zhang.

New Seattle Symphony music director Xian Zhang closed her extraordinarily successful inaugural season with a program coupling the very archetype of a traditional finale—Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, the “Choral”—with a performance of a decidedly non-traditional work, Steven Mackey’s RIOT for chorus, vocalist, and the composer himself on electric guitar, as the opening work.

It’s clear that during this momentous season Xian has cemented her already genial relationship with the orchestra into one of close, mutual understanding and trust in creating meaningful music together. The performance was transcendent in every way. Before taking the reins in September 2025, Xian expressed her deeply felt commitment to bring new sounds to Seattle.

Steven Mackey.

She originally commissioned RIOT as music director of the New Jersey Symphony. Mackey, a Seattle Symphony Artist in Focus for the 2025/2026 season and a prime example of one of the current generation’s key composers, aspires to generate a musical language that crosses platforms while enhancing melody as an all-important focus. His Anemology: Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra was performed by Timothy McAllister and the Seattle Symphony in November 2025.

A rock guitarist who became involved in instrumental composition through the influence of the Downtown New York improv scene and the broader international avant-garde, Mackey’s music is engaging in its unexpected juxtapositions of styles. 

 “I want my music to be human and connected to the core motivations of music—to sing, to dance and to have transcendent experience,” says the GRAMMY-winning composer of works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance, and opera, who credits one single “psychedelic blue note” in Beethoven’s final String Quartet No. 16 in F major, op.135 for opening his eyes and ears to the rock music elements of the classical genre.

The text for RIOT was penned by poet Tracy K. Smith, Mackey’s colleague at Princeton University who, Mackey has said, “knows how to make words sing.” Initially inspired by the death of George Floyd, Smith intended the piece as one that “foregrounds race and resilience,” with six texts that bring together the ideals of hope, commitment, and community. Mackey describes the work as “a RIOT of color and texture." His music is free-spirited, inventive and lively, while also being profound and dramatically coherent. The piece displayed breadth and commitment to the meaning of the text, which was a very dark, somber commentary on the world situation... 

    Sometimes I feel

    the Black in my heart 

    like a map

    made of tar.

 …Yet ending with undertones of hope. For in the end: 

    We live—

Alicia Olatuja.

The performance featured mezzo-soprano and St. Louis native Alicia Olatuja as vocalist. Also known as a composer in her own right as well as an educator whose wide repertoire ranges from jazz to classical, Olatuja sang the work’s world premiere with the New Jersey Symphony led by Xian and was perfectly comfortable in her role. Her voice is a major one: lush, uniquely beautiful. She dominated the Benaroya stage whenever she was singing and portrayed the deeper significance of the text both in her sumptuous sound and her engaging eye movements.

Mackey’s contribution on guitar was heartfelt and played with great tenderness, though one would have liked to have heard more from him in this piece. Xian maintained extraordinary control over the difficult score, the massive forces of the huge orchestration, and the enormous Seattle Symphony Chorale, whose performance was stirring. The conductor’s beats were assured, crystal clear, and technically proficient.

Beethoven claimed that marrying music to poetry was too much of a challenge and that setting words to music caused him “more pain than pleasure,” especially in the writing of his only opera, Fidelio, which was so frustrating for him that he vowed never to write another. He stayed true to his word. Yet two decades later, having survived composing his Choral Fantasy and Missa Solemnis, he managed to write his “Choral” Symphony, but struggled with fitting the strophic text of Schiller's “Ode to Joy” into such a monumental instrumental form. Nonetheless, his Ninth Symphony was an overwhelming success at its premiere in 1824, greeted by cheers from the adoring crowd, and after 200+ years is considered by many the greatest symphonic masterpiece of all time.

One of the last known portraits of Beethoven:
by Johann Stephen Decker, 1824.

Xian’s version of the piece mined its brilliance and popularity by exploiting all the finest possibilities of the orchestra teamed with a top-notch quartet of singers and a vigorous Seattle Symphony Chorale. Her magnanimous gestures dominated the performance and brought to her rendition the enthusiasm, the high level of energy, and the absolute control that this colossal work demands.

She maintained a steady dramatic tension throughout the first movement, Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso, driving the music forward with weight and intensity. In moments both aggressive and intimate, her beat remained consistent in its clarity and precision. In the lyrical sections, the orchestra responded to her expressivity with tender elegance. The subtle rallentando toward the end gave extra emphasis to the urgency of the Coda and the dynamism of the final, emphatic beat.

Given Xian’s high energy approach, the Scherzo second movement (Molto vivace—Presto) was as lively as expected. In her spirited dancing on the podium, she seemed about to levitate at times, but she also knew how to whip the orchestra into a frenzy when called for. The third movement, Adagio molto e cantabile, reflected the deep sensitivity, care and thoughtfulness that went into Xian’s interpretation, motioning on high with her expressive left hand at the most passionate moments and providing a gentle caress at the poignant ones. She sustained the flow throughout each of the movement's extensive variations, allowing the piece to sigh and breathe.

The Finale, which the American musicologist Charles Rosen described as "a symphony within a symphony," was the crowning glory of the evening. Among the vocal soloists, soprano Toni Marie Palmertree stood out by virtue of her golden tones, especially her upper notes, supple and perfect for the demands of the vocal range and the text. Despite her role being understated, Jennifer Johnson Cano’s lavish mezzo sounded lovely.

Tenor Issachah Savage, replacing the originally scheduled SeokJong Baek, impressed with the power and scope of his voice and negotiated the challenging tessitura admirably, though his acting gestures were a bit overdone in the context of the piece. Robert Pomakov was up to the challenge of the iconic bass role in the strength of his operatic voice, but the quality of the tone was harsh at times. The immense sound of the Seattle Symphony Chorale added much to the overall effect of grandeur.

Xian’s performance was a joyful representation of Schiller’s text, ending the rousing evening with an affirmation of much-needed hope for us all.

---ooo---

Benaroya Hall, 200 University St, Seattle, WA 98101, Saturday, June 20, 

7.30 p. m.

Images: The performance: James Holt; Xian Zhang, Steven Mackey: artists' websites; Beethoven: Wikimedia Commons.

“Magnificent Mozart & Mahler” close out the LBSO Season

The reduced strings of the Long Beach Symphony and Music Director Eckart Preu acknowledge the applause after their performance of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

REVIEW

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

DAVID J BROWN

While concert hall programs are often dominated by the big “B”s of the classical repertoire—Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, et al—the “M”s can muster a fair few luminaries as well, and the final concert of the Long Beach Symphony’s 2025-2026 season, as ever under the baton of its Music Director Eckart Preu, was devoted to two of the current brightest: the first a fixture of the repertoire for around a century-and-a-half (perhaps not as long as you might have imagined, given that this year marks the 270th anniversary of Mozart’s birth), and the other exhibiting an inexorable rise in popularity over much less than half that time.

Eckart Preu.

This was, of course, Gustav Mahler, and the LBSO’s current financial buoyancy (long may it continue!) enabled it to muster the largest forces I can recall ever seeing on the Terrace Theater platform, for a performance of his Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor.

I had intended to prepare for this by dusting off some CDs but life intervened, and so I came to Maestro Preu’s interpretation with virtually “innocent ears,” apart from memories of a performance by the Pacific Symphony a couple of years ago in the Segerstrom Concert Hall at Costa Mesa (reviewed here).

To start with, his pre-concert talk was an object-lesson in enthusiastic, fact-filled, and insightful comment about both work and composer, sketching in Mahler’s fraught childhood, his early maturity, his rise in fame as a conductor, and the ethical compromises he made to help secure his appointments as artistic director of the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper) in 1897 and the Vienna Philharmonic in 1898.

Mahler's composing hut in Maiernigg,
near Maria Wörth in Carinthia, Austria,
where he wrote the Fifth Symphony.

As for the Fifth Symphony itself, written in the summers of 1901 and 1902 between Mahler's torrentially busy conducting and administrative duties, Preu emphasized its overall darkness-to-light progression, which may be seen against the background of his rapid rise to pre-eminence in Vienna’s musical culture, a traumatic near-death experience in February 1901, and his affair with and then marriage to the charismatic Alma Schindler in March 1902.

Mahler never approached symphonic structure twice in the same way, and though Symphonies 1, 4, 6, and 9 do adopt the classic four-movement pattern, each is so vastly different in expressive content from the others as to render that commonality irrelevant. Like Symphonies 2, 7, and 10, No. 5 has five movements, but in it, uniquely, Mahler grouped them into three parts: 1 (I+II), 2 (III), and 3 (IV+V).

The Fifth can be felt to conform to the four-movement “standard” if movements I and II are heard as a unity, with movement I, headed Trauermarsch (Funeral March), acting as a huge exposition and its successor an equally massive development, and the way Preu began his clearly thought-through conception of the whole work lent weight to this.

Miles McAllister.

After waiting and—with typical consideration—allowing principal trumpet Miles McAllister to take his own time before embarking on the cruelly exposed, and crucial, 13-measure solo that opens the symphony (in which he meticulously observed the plethora of expressive cues that Mahler spatters through what is surely a call-back—short-short-short-long—to the start of the most famous Fifth Symphony of them all!), the first movement proceeded just as Mahler conceived and marked it—not dragging, but truly In gemessenem Schritt, Streng wie ein Kondukt (with measured step, solemn as a funeral procession).

After this, to my ears, ideally paced and equally finely played account of the first movement, Preu underlined the unity between it and the second by embarking on the latter with barely a breath pause, though Mahler does not mark it attacca. Also, while lacking none of the storminess and vehemence that Mahler requests, his initial tempo, more measured than some conductors in this work, made its opening less of an abrupt shock and more of a natural reaction to the ground-down, exhausted conclusion of the Funeral March.

More thematically and expressively diverse than the first movement, the second can seem to lose its way in a less well-controlled and articulated performance than this, in which the most eloquent passage of all was the long unison soliloquy starting at measure 189 by the cellos alone under a pianissimo timpani roll, Langsam aber immer ((slowly but surely), played with total unanimity by the 10-strong section, led by principal Cécilia Tsan, to profoundly moving effect.

Gustav Mahler in 1902: pencil sketch by Emil Orik.

At the end of movement II Mahler does build in an interpretative pitfall. Its stormy, digressive progress eventually rises to a summit-like brass chorale that prefigures the final triumph that ends the whole work, but to draw out this chorale too much is a mistake.

There has to be a sense of something being kept in reserve, and this Preu finely achieved, so that its collapse into the monstrous chord that destroys all hope of resolution at this stage of the symphony felt exactly right (only a fanatic like me could regret that the tam-tam’s fff smash here—its only such marking in the whole piece—did not obliterate the rest of the otherwise perfectly balanced orchestra, all also fff!).

In a typical (if there be such a thing) four-movement symphony, the middle tends to be occupied by a slow movement and a much shorter scherzo, but in Mahler’s Fifth these proportions are reversed, so that what follows the shattered end of the second movement (still with that Beethovenian short-short-short-long muttering into extinction) is the largest and most complex scherzo in the symphonic repertoire—Part 2 in Mahler’s tripartite scheme—running to 819 measures and lasting around 19 minutes in this performance.

Alma Schindler in 1895, aged 16.

Mahler specifically requests a long pause before this entirely different music begins, with a bright flourish on four horns and then a horn solo leading into the first Ländler subject. He wrote in a letter to Alma: “The Scherzo is—the very devil… Conductors for the next fifty years will take it too fast and make nonsense of it—” and Maestro Preu avoided that with tempi more spacious than many performances and the LBSO responding with playing that was affectionate and easeful, but still alert and responsive.

However, this is arguably one of the most difficult movements in all of Mahler for interpreters to make dovetail and cohere, with a kaleidoscopic range of mood, texture, pace, and dynamic, and in a few places I felt juxtapositions didn’t quite work with the sense of inevitability and through line that they needed. Against that, though, there were many passages to be relished for the sheer élan of the LBSO’s playing collectively and individually, the standout being principal Melia Badalian’s magisterial handling of the long, rapturous horn solo, melancholic and challenging by turns, into which the tumultuous first half of the Scherzo devolves and out of which the movement’s increasingly buoyant latter part grows until its eruptive, headlong end.

Melia Badalian.

The other element in that reversal of middle-movement proportions is of course, the Adagietto, made famous by Visconti’s use of it on the sound-track of Death in Venice. Mahler does mark it Sehr langsam (very slow) and many modern recordings follow this literally, so that it plays for 12-13 minutes, or even longer. However, though sadly no recordings of Mahler conducting exist, in 1905 he did make four piano rolls, including the finale and Trauermarsch of Symphonies Nos. 4 and 5 respectively, and in all of them his tempi are crisp and faster than most modern recordings.

Willem Mengelberg.

Also, his close friend, the conductor Willem Mengelberg, used scores annotated with tempo indications provided by Mahler himself, and his 1926 recording of the Adagietto clocks in at well under eight minutes. In this performance by the LBSO, thankfully, Preu adopted a similar approach, and made the Adagietto—confirmed by Mengelberg to have been a love song to Alma— the gentle, flowing interlude that Mahler surely intended, aided by translucent playing from the LBSO strings, with Marcia Dickstein’s harp an equal partner in eloquence.

Marcia Dickstein.

Though neither as long nor as copiously scored as several other Mahler symphonies, the Fifth is as challenging to interpret and exhausting to play as any—and now after nearly an hour of orchestral turmoil, leavened for the wind, brass and percussion only by the Adagietto, he crowns the whole edifice with a 16-minute finale as complex, diverse, and virtuosically scored as anything that has gone before, but which nonetheless seemed to daunt neither conductor nor orchestra.

Mahler’s wide range of episodes includes several passages of complex fugal writing that were delivered with exemplary rhythmic clarity by the strings. Though, as ever for this listener, it felt as if there’s one too many false dawns as the finale approaches its climax, the whole orchestra surged through the great, conclusive-at-last, chorale and race to the finish with no sign of fatigue, earning a cheering standing ovation and several returns to the podium by Maestro Preu.

Mozart in 1789.

His choice of concert opener had been Mozart’s Serenade No. 13 in G major, K. 525, “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” (1787), its origins as mysterious, as the program noted, as its familiarity is universal. This was a very sensible selection, not only because of that familiarity but also, being scored for strings only, it left the remainder of the orchestra fresh for their herculean task to come. Elegant, rhythmically pointed, and with inner parts always sounding alive and expressive, the reduced LBSO 8-6-6-4-3 strings gave a clear harbinger of what their full forces, at 14-12-10-10-8, would achieve in the Mahler.

However, before he set the Fifth Symphony in motion, Eckart Preu acknowledged the long service of LBSO members, calling for those with progressively more years to remain standing. No fewer than eight had been with the orchestra upwards of 45 years—Ann Brenton, Craig Gibson, Andy Honea, Leslie Lashinsky, Linda Stone, Jacqueline Suzuki, and Alvin Veeh— with a further three (Diane Alancraig, Marcia Dickstein, and Cynthia Moussas) clocking in at over 40.

Sir Neville Cardus.

But in truth, every one of the 90 players deserves a shout-out for the skill and commitment with which they executed this most demanding of symphonies. The great English music critic and Mahler authority Sir Neville Cardus wrote of the Fifth: "The symphony is a work of genius; it is Mahler's greatest contribution to symphonic music proper and 'absolute'. He attained a deeper, more inward tone and form in his Ninth Symphony, no doubt; but never again did he compose as exultantly, as abundantly, as comprehensively, as variously, as in the Fifth... [it] is one of the seven wonders of the symphonic world—and since it was composed 60 years ago, countless musicians, living full, active and lengthy lives in music, have died and never heard a note of it."

Now, 60 years further on from when Cardus wrote those words, his final sentiment is surely no longer true, as the Fifth Symphony has thoroughly entered the orchestral repertoire worldwide—and now centered itself in Long Beach ears through this splendid performance by the LBSO and Eckart Preu. The city has something treasurable in the partnership of its orchestra with their Music Director—long may it continue!

---ooo---

Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach, Saturday, June 6, 2026, 7.30 p.m.

Images: The performance: David de Santiago; Mahler, composing hut, Mozart: Wikimedia Commons; Miles McAllister, Melia Badalian, Marcia Dickstein: Long Beach Symphony; Alma Schindler: Mahler Foundation; Sir Neville Cardus: The Oldie.

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An Eclectic Program from USC Thornton’s Young Stars

l-r: Lina Bahn, Abigail Park, Louis Milne, Abigail Koehler, Solomon Leonard, Seth Parker Woods.

REVIEW

USC Thornton Chamber Virtuosi, Second Sundays at Two, Rolling Hills United Methodist Church

BARBARA GLAZER

This Classical Crossroads' concert featured USC Thornton faculty members Lina Bahn (violin) and Seth Parker Woods (cello), and their premier students—Louis Milne (clarinet), Abigail Park (violin), Solomon Leonard (viola), Andrew Edwards (piano), and Abigail Koehler (bass)—in a diverse program of European masterworks and ethnologically-imprinted American classical compositions. Bahn and Woods in supportive ensemble playing gave center stage to the students for solos in which they excelled, as well as poised and articulate context.

The concert began with all but Andrew Edwards playing You, on the Mountain and Blessed are your Wedding Garments, the first two movements of the four Palestinian Songs and Dances (2024) by the Syrian-born, American-raised Kareem Roustom (b. 1971), the Emmy-nominated ethnomusicologist and Professor of the Practice (orchestration, and film music composition) at Tufts University. Roustom is interested in contextualizing music as a kind of “genetic material” in which to preserve and transmit to a larger audience the whole of a society's culture.

Kareem Rustom.

His strong identification as an Orthodox Syriac Antiochian Christian has inspired his use of Orthodox melodic shapes, hymns, and chants for many works that bridge Western classical and Middle Eastern folk traditions. In You, on the Mountain, a Palestinian folksong with encoded messages for mountaintop-imprisoned loved ones (during the years of the British mandate) is refashioned as a highly emotional and programmatic chamber piece evocative of a place and culture. Blessed are your Wedding Garments, by contrast, uses a folk melody for line dancing at Middle Eastern weddings.

Roustom scored them for clarinet, string quartet, and audio playback, the latter for a more "orchestral" sound and a steady beat to support the melodic lines and more fluid instrumental rhythmic patterns. The clarinet substitutes for the mijwiz's piercing tones, the playback for the yarghul's drone, making the music more accessible for Western players and listeners. The playback is “optional” but its function is necessary. Various instruments can substitute for it and here it was a bass, on which Abigail Koehler was outstanding, and only at a few days’ notice.

Jenö Hubay.

All the players have to make finger adjustments and in addition the clarinet must use circular breathing and changes in embouchure to produce the maqam (Arabic scale), which on Jim Eninger's excellent video can clearly be heard. Clarinetist Milne's gorgeous spectral glissandi, and his ability to maintain the unbroken driving melody and lively rhythm needed to fuel the stamina of the wedding dancers, and suggest their bodily motions, were masterful.

For a stark contrast in music and locale, we next heard Park, with Edwards (piano), play the Carmen Fantaisie Brillante, Op. 3, No. 3 (1877), by the Hungarian-born violinist, composer, and teacher Jenö Hubay (1858-1937). It's a dazzling, virtuosic showpiece in which the 17-year-old Hubay, enthralled by hearing Bizet's Carmen, used the Aragonaise, Habanera, and Escamillo's triumphant Toreador Song (the only violin version to do so), not linearly, but as interwoven themes. It needs very advanced violin techniques as well as the ability to delineate sultry, flirtatious music, singing vocal lines, high drama, and a full “orchestral” sound. Park excelled—and was well supported by Edwards.

Andrew Edwards.

He returned for Debussy’s Étude No.11 (1915), dedicated to Chopin, and entitled Pour les arpèges composés. Its broken chords often include non-harmonic dissonances, while the impressionist use of harmonic tones, blended with a very precise sustaining pedal, is designed to produce the color of the notes—not just their mechanical sounding. This Étude is a masterpiece of shimmering fluid textures, of cascading harp-imitating lines, and strong dynamic contrasts in the scherzando middle section. Without written fingering, the pianist must find their own solutions to these demands of a keyboard exercise transformed into high art, and Edwards did well.

The Jewish/Argentinian/American multi-genre classical and film composer Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960)  is known for blending Western classical music with Latin-American genres and Jewish Klezmer music. He grew up in an Ashkenazi Eastern European household and this Ashkenazi klezmer tradition infuses The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. Isaac the Blind (1160-1235), a kabbalist rabbi of Provence, theorized that the universe is shaped by the meaning and different combinations of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet; Golijov’s work, of which the first movement was played, elaborates on this linguistic role in Jewish history by referencing three historic languages: Aramaic, Yiddish, and Hebrew.

Osvaldo Golijov.

In the Agitato con fuoco opening, the string quartet (Park, Bahn, Leonard, Woods) reference the Rosh Hashanah prayer Un' taneh Tokef—chanted in Hebrew, but containing many Aramaic words, grammatical structures, and concepts. This is juxtaposed with the klezmer clarinet invoking the confessional and merciful pleading prayer Avinu Malkeinu. Milne switched between three types of clarinet (B-flat, A, bass) to achieve a mix of crying, wailing, and weeping in contention with the upbeat dance-like rhythms and joyful klezmer sounds in a movement embodying the tension between ritual and faith, anxiety and yet joy. His was a very good effort at overcoming the movement’s many technical pitfalls.

Robert Schumann.

Next came the Andante cantabile third movement of Robert Schumann’s Piano Quartet, Op. 47, played by Park, Leonard, Woods, and Edwards. This, the work’s emotional core, features a lush, deeply romantic, song-like cello theme which evolves into a tender, almost canonic duet with the violin. Parks played beautifully, and Edwards was an equal colorist partner in his left-hand arpeggios and chordal responses; Woods did not over-emote, avoiding the maudlin or stretching the rhythms, enabling a gentle flow. An excellent performance by all.

Milne's clarinet solo, The Abyss of the Birds—the third movement (of eight) of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (1941)—was magnificent. Messiaen, a French hospital nurse, was captured (late Dec. 1940) by German troops, and while awaiting transportation to a POW camp with his friend, clarinetist Henri Akoka, started writing The Abyss of the Birds, envisioned as part of a suite inspired by his deep Christian faith—in particular, Chapter 10 of the Book of Revelation.

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992).

With a sympathetic camp guard's provision of a pencil, some paper, and access to a decrepit piano, he composed the Quartet for the available instruments (clarinet, violin, cello, piano), within which The Abyss of the Birds was the only solo, written for Akoka. It symbolizes the contrast between the agonizing weight of temporal time, and the jubilant, eternal freedom of nature, and explores the extremes of the clarinet's sonic capabilities—some crescendos so painfully loud as to represent immense psychological pain., Milne's performance was a delight.

The classically trained, Afro-American Jessie Montgomery (b.1981) is famous for combining classical music with R&B, jazz, hip-hop, and poetical references, improvisation, and Black folk elements, to explore themes of social consciousness and community. She wrote Rhapsody No. 1 for violin (2014) for herself to play, intended to be part of set of six violin solos that paid homage to historic solo traditions, especially of J. S. Bach and Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931).

Jessie Montgomery.

She transposed it for the viola (2021)—here played by Leonard—as part of a project featuring various solo voices across different instrumental families, and also to expand the viola's solo repertoire. Although it is heavily inspired by Ysaÿe, that is not the whole story: Montgomery integrates blues harmonies and rhythms, and the improvisatory feel of Afro-American vernacular music. Leonard gave a very impressive performance.

Sheridan Seyfried.

Finally, in this long and highly varied program, came the Con spirito finale of the Sextet (2010), in three movements, for clarinet, piano, and string quartet by Sheridan Seyfried (born 1984 in Philadelphia). His music combines elements of Celtic and American folk music, blues, bluegrass, and New Age and, although not Jewish, he is deeply involved in the Jewish community, for which he wrote his cantata The Voices of the Holocaust. His music is highly approachable—vibrant, with easy-to-follow melodies. This finale gave each player moments to shine, and they did! Plaudits to them, and to Jim Eninger for his video, and for hosting the talented Thornton players.

 

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Second Sundays at Two, Rolling Hills United Methodist Reform Church, Sunday, May 10, 2026, 2:00 p.m.

Images: The performers: Classical Crossroads, Inc.; Roustom, Golijov, Montgomery, Seyfried: Composers' websites; Hubay, Schumann, Messiaen: Wikimedia Commons; Andrew Edwards: Instagram.

Mendelssohn and Fauré Masterworks in the Dome

REVIEW

“Piano & Strings,” Mount Wilson Observatory

JOHN STODDER

On the penultimate Sunday in May, in the 100-inch Telescope Dome at the Mount Wilson Observatory—5,713 ft. above sea level and 50 miles away from Walt Disney Concert Hall—two sold-out programs of classical music showcased a contrasting pair of masterpieces of 19th century chamber music, Felix Mendelssohn’s outgoing and melodic Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 49 (1839), and Gabriel Fauré’s brooding and unpredictable Piano Quartet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 15 (1876).

Each show had about 215 audience members, because that’s all that will fit in the unusual semicircular balcony space the Observatory offers for performances—each had a waiting list of 25 more people who would’ve attended. The organizers of this annual summer Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome series, including Artistic Director Cécilia Tsan (who performed in both pieces) have struck gold artistically as well as experientially. If the Observatory wasn’t so far from LA’s urban enclaves, I suspect the demand for tickets would be overwhelming.

The 100-inch Hooker Telescope Dome.

To get to the Dome, you need to find your way to the Angeles Crest Highway turnoff from the Foothill Freeway, ascending the San Gabriel Mountain range for about 14 winding miles until reaching Mount Wilson Red Box Road, a narrow, twisting five-mile path that climbs to the Observatory.

I’m used to this landscape looking more desert-like even in late spring, but the soaking winter rains allowed the native chapparal, trees, grasses, and wildflowers to thrive colorfully across the foothills and peaks—deep green foliage, bright yellow wildflowers, and the fragrance of pine that followed us to our seats in the Dome (right). The journey turned out to be the perfect overture for the concert, especially the first piece performed, the Mendelssohn Trio—so carefree and sweet, like the arrival of spring.

The audience heard two virtuoso violinists: Asi Matathias, an Israeli musician who helmed the Mendelssohn, and Tosca Opdam, his Dutch spouse who led the Fauré. They had travelled to Southern California from Europe and in both pieces were joined by cellist Cécilia Tsan and pianist Zachary Deak, with violist Carson Rick added for the Fauré.

The musicians got a boost from the Observatory, which displayed ideal acoustics for chamber music. Reverberant yet crisp. Precise yet powerful. Little did the architects and builders of the Dome know that, in addition to helping humanity explore the mysteries of the universe, they were building the perfect vessel for a chamber music concert.

The piano, a refurbished 1907 vintage Steinway (the same year the 100-inch mirror at the base of the Hooker Telescope (above) was cast in France, according to the helpful pre-show introduction by Mount Wilson Institute COO Dan Kohne) had a shimmering gorgeousness, while the strings filled the space with silken, sweet-sounding tones.

Felix Mendelssohn, 1837.

The Mendelssohn was the perfect music to greet an audience that had just passed through the verdant, craggy highlands of Southern California and witnessed the famous “illusion of the Dome” that fooled even Albert Einstein—from the platform it looks as if the Telescope itself is turning, but it’s really the whole Dome on its 109-year-old but amazingly smooth bearings, bearings that had to track the distant universe for 16-hour photographic exposures.

Felix Mendelssohn’s First Piano Trio feels as romantic as Beethoven, but as exquisitely balanced as Mozart, to whom Robert Schumann compared Mendelssohn. It is one of the most magical of romantic chamber music masterpieces, one that, over the course of its four movements, delineates a person’s consciousness of love—the commotion of longing in the first movement (Molto allegro ed agitato), the tenderness of felt love in the second (Andante con moto tranquillo), the delight of passion in the Leggiero e vivace Scherzo, and the triumphant power of a new attachment in the Allegro assai appassionato finale.

Asi Matathias, Zachary Deak, and Cécilia Tsan.

The trio’s virtuosity was most on display in the breathless Scherzo, with Deak and the unit of two strings tossing joyful phrases back and forth, sometimes echoing, sometimes answering, keeping pace with each other as they raced downhill. Many Americans are experiencing bouts of despair at the damaging national and international developments of this moment in time. All the more reason to absorb Mendelssohn’s insightful, sincere statement of appreciation for what is joyful and good about being alive; with the added excitement of watching such passionate musicians proclaim it literally to the heavens.

Gabriel Fauré, by John Singer Sargent.

The joy Mendelssohn so successfully depicted goes behind dark clouds in Fauré’s First Piano Quartet, which followed the Mendelssohn without intermission—instead, there was just a pause to reconfigure the platform to include violist Carson Rick. Opdam, taking over the violinist’s chair, soon had a solo in the Allegro molto moderato first movement, following the opening section for all four players that sounded like someone pacing in a circle, ruminating, full of uncertainty.

Her solo extended the initial sense of imbalance, literally, in a passage full of unexpected, seemingly unnatural emphases, like someone struggling to put on their shoes after hearing a knock on the door. Quickly, the piano asserts control, straightens out the wrinkles, and begins presenting the movement’s melancholy themes more conventionally. It is a very talkative movement: we are hearing Faure’s side of an elusive but traumatic story.

The Scherzo that follows feels like a game of can’t-catch-me, with the musicians racing away from each other. It is whimsical but guarded, never letting the listener relax. A halt and shift of tone halfway through was so abrupt that audience members applauded, thinking the movement had ended. Its second half slows matters down slightly for a dialogue between the piano and strings that had elements of self-mockery in the voicings of the viola and cello. It is almost as if Fauré was signaling that the frolicking is fun but shouldn’t be trusted.

Tosca Opdam, Zachary Deak, Cécilia Tsan, and Carson Rick.

In the third movement Adagio, we heard a succession of unique textures melting into each other, with Opdam, Tsan and Rick peeling off for brief and solemn solo and duet statements, often accompanied by dreamy piano arpeggios. Cellist Tsan and violist Rick were frequently called upon to supply a growling sonic undercurrent, a river of dark tone created by their lowest strings being bowed hard and slowly. The sense of being chased by mysteries one doesn’t want to confront continued in the more formal, elegantly romantic, final Allegro molto, where Faure’s struggle reaches a stormy climax.

As the Faure’s final moment lingered under the Dome, I felt—and I’m sure most of the audience felt— that we had been on a journey from one form of strength to another: from Mendelssohn’s clarity about what is most beautiful in our existence, to Faure’s rational and devastating doubts, and his courage in illuminating uncertainty. Much for each of us to reflect on as we drove through the mountains again toward home on this perfect day. 

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100-inch Telescope Dome, Mount Wilson Observatory, Sunday, May 24, 2026, 3:00 p.m./5:00 p.m.

Images: The performance: Todd Mason; Landscape: John Stodder; Mendelssohn and Fauré: Wikimedia Commons.