Not lately, and certainly not in her new collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, Landfall, that had its East Coast premiere over the weekend at Montclair (NJ)  State University’s Peak Performance series.

Early on in the piece, the string quartet plays a probing, wandering melody amid vaguely mournful chords gently propelled by an electronic rhythm track. Then, Anderson began to speak – something she hadn’t done so much of in this piece.

Knowing that her personal archive at her downtown Manhattan Canal Street headquarters had been destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, you still had to be startled  by her emotional directness: “I know now that I could never go back to a place where I had been so sad. The river had been rising all day. And the hurricane was coming up from the south….Sandy looked like the galaxy whose names I didn’t even know….”

Then came a list of galaxies with fanciful, even satirical names that normally would’ve been arch, Laurie Anderson humor, but amid the saddest music yet. She was conducting a memorial service for the previous levity of her art. She can still be funny in her offhanded, coolly observant way. Anderson still has that wonderful bedside-manner voice, spinning her fact-based tales of things you might’ve seen yourself had you peered deep enough at the world around you. The voice always stands at a safe, dispassionate distance from the event being described, telling you that there’s basically nothing to fear.

Now, there is something to fear. And though Landfall doesn’t come out and say it, I believe she’s talking about the  possibility of human extinction.

The form of the piece was, typical of Anderson, episodic. Musically speaking, it was a suite of adagio movements, not quite background or foreground, that made me think of the Haydn’s Last Seven Words in the string quartet version, a piece that similarly doesn’t come out and say what it means but seems to accompany one’s more personal and vivid sense of inner tragedy. As did her score for Landfall, with some collaborative help from Kronos and arranger Jacob Garchik.

Though the music was never without quietly compelling ideas, they felt more like minimalist physical gestures than sometimes with a strong melodic profile – often heard in conjunction with electronic effects, obvious ones such as thunder but also rhythm tracks. Enigmatic voices that might’ve come from walkie-talkies were  embedded in the musical textures, not quite intelligible, sounding almost like chants. At times, electronics were at the fore with eloquent, stabbing commentary from Kronos.

Visuals often consisted of words riffing on what Anderson had just mentioned, such as a list of possible galaxies she knew nothing of. One long section dealt with endangered species, from rare butterflies to hog-nosed skunks, animals I never ever knew existed. Do I remember correctly, that she said 99 percent of all the species that ever roamed the planet are now extinct?

Are we next in line?

Then came numbers, seemingly random numbers, and all moving on the rear screen from the bottom up, as if the viewer were sinking and watching the numbers drift by. Eventually, the numbers were in bank fonts, the sort printed along the bottom of checks. Soon, the square-ish blocks so characteristic of the fonts – the ones that give “8”s a pot belly and make “1”s resemble a potted plant – took over the forms of the numbers themselves. So you just had the blocks – still drifting by as we sank.

Nuclear holocausts that might’ve ended the world in the 1960s supposedly would’ve left only the cockroaches. Will only the numbers of our digital culture survive the environmental holocaust? Several years ago I wrote a comic play about the end of the world, set in Florida (because it seemed to be at the vanguard of decay) in which the populace of grifters and just-plain-folks coped with the daily hurricanes and encroaching sink holes with rampant, serial wedding ceremonies because nobody wanted to die alone. Until people suddenly stopped dying. The title: Stumbling Down the Aisle on Doomsday.

How foolishly optimistic this seems in retrospect. Will anybody have time to get married in the next hurricane? Where would you find the Elvis impersonators to perform the ceremonies? Besides, hurricanes and sink holes are only the beginning. Have you heard about the ice tsunamis in Manitoba and Minneapolis when wind whips across lakes, picking up melting snow and piling it up against beach-front homes? Silently, too, advancing at a casual speed, ambling implacably, benign in manner but mowing things down in its path.

The fact that I have to guess at Anderson’s meaning as another place where Landfall departs from her other pieces. Usually, her intent is crisply articulated. Here, her work still maintains clarity of form – we know what we’re seeing – but she’s letting her audience participate more fully in deciding what it means. Or maybe Landfall is still a work in progress and meaning will be clearer in later versions. Which is something else I love about her work: Every step in their artistic progression, her pieces have plenty to offer.

Strads are hardly news in Philadelphia.  Why would anybody suggest otherwise? My theory: The veneration of rare instruments has escalated to a new level. Price records keep getting broken, the current one being $3.6 million paid for the Molitor Strad that is thought to have once been owned by Napoleon Bonaparte. We’ve probably seen the last generation of violinists who can actually own such instruments with their own financial resources – such as Gil Shaham and Maxim Vengerov, now in their mid-40s.

Many string players fear they can’t have a proper career without some rare instrument, preferably one of the 650 surviving Strads, particularly from the violin-maker’s so-called golden period from 1700 to 1725. But only foundations, museums and institutions can afford to own them now – and, happily, most of those organizations seem to be pretty intelligent about which players play them on loan. But they’re still on loan. If word gets out that you left the instrument unguarded or in an unsafe place … kiss the Strad goodbye.

A few of the top names might be seen as quietly boycotting this rat race: Hilary Hahn has said she’s perfectly happy with her Vuillaume, and Christian Tetzlaff, who once had a Strad, now plays a modern instrument made by Stefan-Peter Greiner. The Tokyo Quartet is surrendering its four “Paganini Strads” (a supposedly matched set once owned by Niccolò Paganini) after it plays its last concert this summer, and you don’t see them rending their garments.

Tokyo Quartet cellist Clive Greensmith has lived on both sides – scrounging for a good instrument and living with one of the Paganini Strads – and he takes a measured view. He’s grateful for years with the fine cello, of course, but also states that the instrument “is a tool.”

It’s not always a cooperative one. Though Strads have a mystique of allowing violinists to realize their ideas with an ease and beauty that’s less possible with other instruments, they also have a way of telling their players what to do.

Compare, for example, the pre-Strad Tokyo Quartet recording of Beethoven’s Op. 131 on RCA. During one of the fast movements, there’s a moment where the players are directed to bow on or close to the instrument’s bridge; in the earlier Tokyo recording, it’s a hugely witty, scintillating effect. Something similar happens on the quartet’s later rendition on Harmonia Mundi – though this time, violinist Martin Beaver (who didn’t play on the early recording, just for the record) had to seriously work at it. “Those instruments don’t want to sound ugly,’ he said. “It’s hard to get a real ponticello.”

At the May 4th Salome Chamber Orchestra concert at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the instruments had a way of dictating repertoire as well as sound. The Salome group is one of those super-chamber orchestras that exists part time with the participation of soloists such as violist David Aaron Carpenter, violinist Philippe Quint and others. On this occasion, several members played on instruments from the museum’s Sau-Wing Lam Collection. As much as I admire Carpenter and Quint, these rare instruments need great music as well as great players.

The concert’s climax was Ludwig Maurer’s pleasant but completely inconsequential Concertante for 4 Violins in A minor, Op. 55, which was clearly exhumed to show off four golden-age Strads playing simultaneously. And yes, they sounded wonderful. But that sound was used in a context that was nearly meaningless. So was much of the other repertoire in the concert. In all fairness, the whole atmosphere of the program was on the lighter side, bordering on café music, rightly inspiring a kind of highly-physical performing style that comes with it.

But this is not what we need.

The state of classical music is, in many ways, a battle against encroaching uniformity. And much of that uniformity is about sounding pretty – the sort of prettiness that Michael Tilson Thomas used to call “the deluxe non-specific.” Singers want to sound more like Kiri Te Kanawa than Maria Callas. And God help anybody who sounds like Lotte Lenya – a singer who needed only to exhale in order to be devastating.

Even though instrumentalists don’t have certain resources to distinguish one from another (such as the use of words), I’m still disturbed that Itzhak Perlman has been quoted as hearing a violin performance on the radio and guessing as to whether or not it’s him.  He should know his playing when he hears it. And when great musicians sound so similar, the experience of classical music takes on another layer of redundancy.

This is not to disparage Strads. One can often spot one with the naked ear. Within a few days of each other, I heard Hahn play the Korngold Violin Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the young, up-and-coming violinist Kristin Lee play the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in an Astral Artists concert, also in Philadelphia. Hahn conveyed all of Korngold’s necessary voluptuousness not just with her sound but with her considerable musical willpower (which no doubt comes from her brain). However, in the final movement that put her through Heifetzian paces, her tone grew pale under pressure.

Lee’s Tchaikovsky, in contrast, was amazing for how she maintained a beautiful tone – and an eloquent, poetic manifestation of beauty – even when under the most technical pressure. The quality of her instrument surely played a role in this. But I had no idea what sort of violin she played until I checked a few minutes ago. And it was a Strad.

This could easily open up a debate that not all repertoire is for Strads (a position Tetzlaff has taken) and not all musicians are temperamentally suited to Strads. The instruments most certainly have their place, but it’s not an all-encompassing one. And in any case, I’ve always loved violinists more for their minds than their fingers. Yes, I’m one of those people who collects late-period Joseph Szigeti and Albert Spalding recordings – though I can’t say that I seek them out everyday (or anything close to it).

Such is the situation with the unpromisingly-titled Paul’s Case by composer Gregory Spears and librettist Kathryn Walat, first heard in ink-not-yet-dry circumstances in the 2009 Philly Fringe Festival. Now, in a new, late-April production by the Washington, D.C.-area company Urban Arias, the piece is nearly ready to claim a place in the chamber opera repertoire – thanks to a long-haul development process for which American Opera Projects deserves much credit.

Simplistically speaking, it’s an opera about a teen-age gay suicide – the most obvious reason why its time has come, even though the narrative is set in 1906. As seen at the Arlington, VA Artscape, in a production directed by Kevin Newbury (who is also working with Spears on the forthcoming Fellow Travelers), Paul’s Case is hugely communicative on every level, and it’s such integrated theater (mostly) that you come away with the world of the piece inside of you, though you’re not sure by what means it got there.

Based on a Willa Cather short story of the same title, Paul’s Case concerns a misfit high-school boy in Pittsburgh who lives in a well-upholstered world of his own, dreaming of beauty and luxury, dresses like a dandy with a trademark red carnation in his lapel, and has probably given up any hope of acceptance among his peers – or teachers, who begin the opera lined up at the edge of the stage, a united front, humming. It’s one of several effects in the production that initially seem benign but create a checkmate situation for the title character, who runs away to New York City on stolen money, checks into the Waldorf, has a romantic winter night on the town, and meets his end – one that he has planned – as he buries his red carnation in the snow.

The character is explored so fully by the two-hour, two-act opera that Paul emerges as sort of a cross between Manon Lescaut, an alluring innocent with a childlike fascination with the best things that money can buy, and Peter Grimes, the outsider whom the world hates though it doesn’t really know why.

Paul’s intoxication with dreams of a more glamorous world isolates him, and his perceived insolence gets him expelled from school, even though there’s no specific incident to pin on him. He’s a rare bird whose only sin is opacity. And because of that, he’s thrust into the hopelessly mundane working world where large sums of money pass through his hands quickly.

Once the theft is done and the train to New York is caught, Paul just can’t believe how easy it all was. He meets a Yale boy in the city for the weekend who shows him around; they nearly sink into bed together but do not. Maybe if they had, Paul’s carnation would not have been (metaphorically) buried in the snow.

The performing apparatus was nine musicians and a thrust stage in a black box theater; the staging was stronger for suggesting settings rather than depicting them. Only at the end is there a coup de théâtre: A grid of overhead interrogation lights – another initially benign image – lowers down onto Paul in the final scene as he’s lying in the New York City snow, armed with a gun that tells you he always knew his spree would end with him facing utter disgrace and possibly jail time, and that he always intended to end his life this way.

Musically, Spears counts as two primary influences Minimalism and Baroque opera. The Minimalist aspect seems there mostly for propulsion; by Baroque opera, we mean not Handel but Monteverdi. Paul’s Case has not arias per se but ariosos that naturally explore the character while advancing the story. Certain techniques from other Spears pieces are apparent: He likes starkly stated chords accompanying narrative passages, and, just so we don’t think any musical road is too smooth, the vocal lines are littered with grace notes that aren’t graceful in the least but feel like the bumps of real life.

The score is full of lyrical impulses, though they’re only intermittently found in the vocal lines. There’s a compositional selflessness in that: the opera might be more superficially attractive with big set-piece arias in each of the two acts, but they could cost the story-telling its flow. Instead, the Act II climax has melodies of great power woven all around Paul like the sumptuous clothes he has purchased with stolen money, with his own vocal lines partaking of this lyricism here and there, always maintaining a sense of theatrical verisimilitude. People don’t sing long, pretty vocal lines when in suicidal despair.

But you can’t have followed Spears in recent years without feeling that Paul’s Case doesn’t represent the current state of his art. My feeling from his more recent music, such as the Requiem and the work-in-progress Wolf-in-Skins, is that his writing has grown more spare and articulate. But those coming to Paul’s Case fresh probably wouldn’t hear the piece as immature in the least – with the possible exception of the first scene in Act I, by-the-book Minimalism whose repetition fails to move the narrative forward. And occasionally, Spears’s trademark use of vocal grace notes feels a bit obscure.

However, most questionable moments were overridden by the power of the story – not to mention the performers. It’s hard to imagine anybody but tenor Jonathan Blalock playing Paul, with his light Rossini tenor, a face as easy to read as a TV screen and a sense of wonder amid the cold hard reality of his world.

You also know that much is right with this opera if only because of the many uncomfortable questions it raises. Paul’s suicide avoids one of the primary conditions of adulthood: coping with loss, in his case the loss of his appetites and dreams. It’s true that Paul is unwilling to bide his time and to properly earn the life he wants – if that’s even possible in his repressive world. You have to ask, though, if it’s right to avoid compromise, to not adapt himself over the long term – as opposed to enduring long stretches of being of one the living dead and not knowing if his life is going to get any better.

It’s often said that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. But how temporary? And how bearable is the wait?

My personal reactions to these issues were particularly penetrating given that the opera was performed in the middle of what used to be a 1980s bare-bones office ghetto in Rosslyn, VA. In fact, Artsphere is literally across the street the first location of USA Today, where I once worked.

I once knew every inch of what was then an uninviting, beige concrete,  boulevard, and I never imagined that I would ever see an opera there. For years, you were lucky even to find something as exotic as a Chinese restaurant. Now, decades later, delis are everywhere offering smoothies and Kombucha tea.  For me the surroundings underlines that what Paul’s Case fails to take into account – and this is an observation of Cather’s original, not a judgment – is the possibility of miraculous turnaround.

During my years on that street, the AIDS epidemic was spreading so fast, and with so little hope of a cure (at the time the larger world seemed not to even want one), that my friends were disappearing into hospitals at a rate that felt like the Stalin purges.  Now – albeit millions of deaths later – that’s history. Twelve years before that, I was in Washington protesting the Vietnam War – with no honorable solution in sight – while my contemporaries

were either being killed or having their lives ruined by mysterious chemicals and post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, there are people who never saw Vietnam in wartime who are going there for bicycling vacations.

Is it worth the cost of waiting for the world to come around to something you can stand to live in? My assumed answer is “yes,” because my choice was not Paul’s. But in real life, it’s a decision most of us make by default. Without the confrontation inherent in Paul’s case, we keep living for lack of any immediately compelling reason not to.

So is Paul’s choice to be respected?

Modern musicians (well, a few of them) can convincingly echo the musical manners that died after World War II through close study of the older recordings – some of them made live at the Frick with the likes of Joseph Szigeti and Artur Schnabel. But the Bennewitz Quartet, formed only in 1998 in Prague, reached further back in its New York debut, and its program of Mozart’s Quartet K. 458 (“The Hunt”), Bartok’s Quartet No. 3 and Schubert’s Quartet D. 810 (“Death and the Maiden”) seemed to tread in the most standard of repertoire, as if to show just how distinctive its playing is.

Though the Bartok 3rd never quite found its legs – the group started off on the wrong foot, with uncertain interpretative purpose – the rest of the program projected a distinctive, standard-setting personality, one defined to a large extent by first violinist Jiri Nemecek.  He reads off scores with all four quartet lines in front of him; more importantly, he plays with a selective use of vibrato that requires clean, tight chord tunings, yielding amazing blends with the other instruments as well as a distinctive, immediately recognizable sound. Yet this lower-vibrato timbre isn’t the same as the historically-informed-performance approach one hears in the low-cal sonorities of, say, the Salomon String Quartet. (As a group, the Bennewitz can make some imposing sounds, with cellist Stepan Dolezal’s reduced vibrato undergirding everything with an eloquent buzz.) Nemecek’s playing seems to be a speculative vision not of the 18th century, but one of the late 19th century, before near-constant vibrato made the historical-performance revisionists necessary.

How do I know these things? I’m 316 years old.

Or I might as well be. The explosion of music available on the internet reaches into discographic terrains that only ten years ago

weren’t worth mining for releases because of the overhead involved with physical discs. Now the three dozen people in the world who crave the early 1920s recordings of British violinist Arthur Catterall can not only find them, we can hear them with unprecedented clarity thanks to digital remastering.

The famous 1903 recordings of Brahms collaborator Joseph Joachim have often been heard with a bit of disbelief. Maybe it was the antique technology that made his playing sounds so wispy and vibrato-free. You could excuse a similar effect from Vienna’s Rose Quartet, recorded in reliable electrical sound but at a point when the musicians were up in years.

Such arguments don’t stick to Catterall. He’s a 19th-century personality, thanks to an early-developing talent that put him so much in the thick of things that he played in chamber-music evenings at Bayreuth for Cosima Wagner in 1902. His sonata recordings from the early-‘20s are clear enough to suggest that they’re an accurate representation. A movement from Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio Op. 50 with Catterall as part of the Manchester Trio (posted on YouTube) was recorded after the invention of the microphone and has similarly striking passage-work that seems to slide from note to note without the constant vibrating that our ears have come to expect. That – along with some 1930 Dvorak played by Pozniak Trio recordings just posted last week on www.pristineaudio.com – introduces the world of the Bennewitz Quartet’s Mozart.

Some modern quartets will take rubatos at obvious places near cadences and ends of movements. The Bennewitz players do that, but they also use small internal rubatos that wake up passages that, with most groups, had long-ago settled into received-wisdom sameness from performance to performance. Portamento – which can make phrases seesaw in ways that add an airborne instability – was heard in the inner voices so as not to upset Mozart’s classical surfaces.

The judicious vibrato frees the Bennewitz from the uniformity of color and texture one hears from many modern quartets who came of age in the 1980s. Thus, each of the discrete variations in “Death and the Maiden” had its own contrasting sound world, with coloristic matters intensified by rubato that was thoughtfully contoured to the music at hand – and, again, not just in the usual places. Genuine trills had a seismic impact in a way they never can when arising from a nest of constant fingerboard quavering.

Now and then, I thought I had determined the ground rules that dictate Nemecek’s use of vibrato. Usually, he vibrated only at the end of a note. At times, vibrato was used like a bookend in a given phrase, leaving higher, more exposed violin lines in the crest of a phrase to soar clean, clear and vibrato-less. Then he would do something close to the opposite.

Duh! Music isn’t a method! It’s instinctual. And with an ease of execution that’s characteristic of the younger, technically adept quartets of the 21st century, Bennewitz has (and exercises) the option to be spontaneous. By now, you can probably feel the best-of-two-worlds cliché coming. But it’s true.

By the way, where did these guys get their name? Some Czech symbolist author who is yet to be translated into English? No. It comes from Czech violinist and teacher Antonin Bennewitz, whose dates are 1833-1926.  And what does that tell you?

“He strikes a huge stride over all kinds of music. Light, dark, contrapuntal, monophonic, high and low registers … he revels in extreme contrasts. And like a tight-rope artist, he’s also an entertainer,” said guitarist David Starobin, a longtime advocate of Ruders, introducing the composer’s music at an April 3^rd recital at the Curtis Institute of Music.

To that, I would add that he finds chaos in order, and order in chaos.

The program of new and old works – mostly chamber pieces involving classical guitar, sometimes solo, other times with violin or a small chamber ensemble – was raucous, fearless stuff. But in the end the music achieved its own kind of logic – much like that of Elliott Carter, who followed few if any compositional systems but always knew what he was saying and where he was headed.

Yet years of listening to Ruders didn’t lead the way to his Oboe Concerto, heard in its U.S. premiere in the New York Philharmonic’s Contact! concert on April 6 at Symphony Space: It’s a lonely, wintry piece in which each movement was named after a region on the moon – still identifiably rugged, impulsive Ruders, but in a manner that was much more contained, though extreme in its own containment.

The Curtis connection wasn’t obvious: Starobin is one of the more recent faculty additions, virtually starting the classical guitar program. Without Starobin – and his Bridge Records – Ruders would be less recorded and far less known in the U.S., even though some of his major operas such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Selma Jezkova (based on the film Dancer in the Dark) have received high-profile stateside performances. It’s also possible that Ruders wouldn’t write so much for guitar without Starobin’s encouragement: The instrument’s limitations are not what you’d expect Ruders to embrace, though it’s probably that challenge that appeals to him.

What all these fancy descriptions of his music add up to is this: In his 11-movement Psalmodies (Guitar Concerto No. 1), the “Fanfare for All” section has a rhapsodic clarinet solo set against some haltingly aggressive rhythms from the guitar and other instruments, though everybody changes roles at point or another. But in other movements the entire ensemble was sometimes surprisingly of one mind, but charging like a herd of buffalo.

Ruders seems to pull even harder at the seams of his music as time goes on. The Curtis concert contained a world premiere for guitar and violin titled Schrödinger’s Cat that, among other things, had the two instruments playing such contrasting ideas simultaneously that you felt like they were playing different pieces in the same room. However, the complete incongruity you hear in Charles Ives wasn’t achieved, most likely intentionally. Even though the ideas sounded nothing like each other, they felt like they were meant to be together, though for no reason that one could describe logically.

(Footnote: Ruders’s titles are perhaps to be questioned, since he admitted he always wanted to write a piece titled Schrödinger’s Cat – the name of a paradoxical thought experiment meant to demonstrate the weirdness of quantum physics – even though the title’s meaning has absolutely nothing to do with the music.)

But the movement subtitles in the 1998 Oboe Concerto seem apt. The composer has described the piece as four miniature tone poems suggested by the “legendary, myth-shrouded celestial body,” as Ruder calls the moon in his notes. It’s barely a concerto: the solo part has few notes, but difficult ones. How could that be? The closing moments in the final movement, subtitled “Lake of Death”, were full of pitches that were high, long and plaintive, floating over a soft bed of what sounded like microtonal (and emotionally neutral) harmonies.

Though the composer warned that the music was, in his words, “gloomy”; my word would be “barren”, though not in the sense of any musical vacancy. There was less musical activity, at least with respect to earthly density, but what’s there makes an arresting impression because of the lack of any typical musical frame.

Most radical, perhaps, was a lack of inner hum in the music. Even the most spare minimalism has a motor at its core. Not this music – inspired as it is by that fascinating though lifeless hunk of rock floating in the sky. The “Sea of Tranquility” third movement was marked as being a cadenza, but it more resembled the solo clarinet movement in Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.

To say that this piece is a significant addition to the oboe concerto repertoire is damning it with faint praise. It’s a significant concerto, period, that creates a strong, alternative route for other composers to follow.

All of the works on the stimulating but playful Philharmonic program, while not resorting to anything close to modernism, went far beyond sounds created from notes and rest. Having listened to a lot of electronic music of late, I seem particularly attuned to sonorities that transcend any typical musical building blocks that have been in use over the past several centuries. I’m talking about synthetic sounds consciously or unconsciously re-conceived for acoustic instruments.  As manifested in works like Yann Robin’s Backdraft - a world premiere at the Contact! concert for which I can’t summon a descriptive vocabulary on only one listening – this is the most gratifying outgrowth yet of the forever-fringe world of computer music.

“You’re asking the wrong guy,” I said. And before I could disqualify myself by claiming to be gay, the driver’s head snapped the other direction and was off.

In retrospect, that moment began my karmic payback for being so dismissive toward some guys with a simple need for risqué fun. Weeks later, I was in such a place, not wanting to be there, and discovering the meaning of that old adage: “The main purpose of a strip club is to separate you from your money.” I was there for an opera, of all things, that turned into my most uncongenial theater experience since sitting through Porgy and Bess in front of a woman afflicted with Tourette’s Syndrome.

The occasion was the closing night (March 29) of Eliogabalo, a recently discovered 1668 opera by a composer I would get on an airplane to hear, Francesco Cavalli. Gotham Chamber Opera’s production came at a higher price. Depicting the debauched Roman ruler who reigned for only a few of his teen-age years before his ambi-sexual obnoxiousness prompted his own guards to put him to death, Eliogabalo  received its New York City premiere at The Box, which isn’t exactly a strip club but something more expensive and exclusive, a cabaret of sorts with entertainment described on Yelp.com as sexual freak shows (pre-op trans-sexuals, etc.).

You have to know exactly where The Box is on Chrystie Street: It behaves so much like a speakeasy that the pizza clerk down the street had never even heard of it. The Box seems to be a place where tourists walk on the wild side and go home feeling profoundly cool. And what a good place, conceptually speaking, for an opera about a monarch who is said to have offered doctors heaps of gold to turn him into a woman. You could imagine the New York City Opera’s George Steel kicking himself and wondering, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Good thing he didn’t. My guess is that Gotham Chamber Opera didn’t realize the problems with the venue until it was way too late to pull the plug.

The night of the performance, a crowd was gathered outside. You got your pre-ordered tickets from the guy in the red jacket. Immediately, you sensed who worked for whom. The Gotham Chamber Opera people were sweet and a tad apologetic. The bouncer who clearly worked for The Box told you, “It’s best if you check your coat at the door” as if this was the first stage of being part of The Scene.

Not having cared about being cool since 1985, I didn’t take that suggestion well. And what was supposed to be a full-view standing room ticket – purchased for $50 – afforded me little more than a glimpse of the surtitle screen above a sea of heads. I was told to wait in line for spaces in the balcony to open up – The Box is a re-purposed theater, though a tiny one – after the opera was underway. Somewhere around the second or third scene, we were ushered up the stairs, passing neo-Grecian alcoves with heavy curtains that could be drawn for privacy.

Standing in the very rear, leaning on the bar, the view wasn’t any better, since the people with chairs were standing up, having paid much more money than I (tickets were as high as $140) to glimpse the opera. Some person with authority asked them to sit down. The curt answer: “No.” We’d all been through a lot.

The usher parked us one place; the exasperated stage manager ordered us elsewhere. Backstage space is so cramped, apparently, that singers in this 20-member cast had to ascend to the balcony, walk across it and down the left side to make their way onstage. The stage manager was in charge of keeping the way clear. The singers didn’t always cooperate. Some stopped off to chat with friends in the audience.

You might think that a club built for voyeurism would have decent sight lines. Not this one. At intermission, one standee who had actually found a seat reported that she had to twist herself around so severely in order to see that she feared traction was in her future. A failed strip club? “No! It’s a tease!” said one friend. Remember the words of Gypsy Rose Lee: “Make ‘em beg and then don’t give it to them.”

You might wonder why I didn’t leave. But there comes a point where you ask, “How bad can this get?”

Very bad. The anything-goes air of the venue didn’t have a positive impact on the cast’s artistry. Though the music director was Grant Herreid (a fine musician I know from Piffaro, the Renaissance wind band), the singers overacted, oversang, over-everythinged. Given the racy subjects favored by Cavalli – and the fact that Venetian opera during this period had little of the Zeffirellian grandeur we now associate with the art form – performances shouldn’t be polite. But they should be clear, not clouded by a lot of performance bluster.  From what I could hear, the opera itself had moments of hugely expressive lyricism and effective recitatives that are deeply characteristic of Cavalli. He was a great composer, and we only know a fraction of his works.

More, please? But please, someplace else?

“Maybe that’s why people invented picnics. If they can’t eat it [beauty] they can at least eat in its presence.”

So said the Princeton-based composer by way of introducing his piece Groundswell to the audience at American Modern Ensemble’s American Stories concert on March 26 at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music.

The subject, on that rainy Monday in New York City, was what makes composers compose. And for him, composing is an effort to hang onto beauty that he’s experienced. Specifically in Groundswell, he was trying to capture his experiences mountain-hiking and freestyle-skiing – which he did professionally when much younger, until a career-ending injury made him turn to composing. (He’s credited with being the first “Brooklyn composer” – in terms of cool rather than geography, since Princeton University is his longtime home.)

The piece itself turned not to be yet another instance of fine abstract instrumental music coming with extensive accounts of what stimulated the piece’s creation – information that, in my opinion, was not so necessary and could well limit the listening imagination that one could bring to the piece.

The day before (Sunday at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center), Michael Daugherty unveiled a tuba concerto titled Reflections on the Mississippi.  I was happy to know the general subject matter partly because the music was lyrical, majestic and so different from past Daugherty pieces I’ve heard that some sort of explanation was in order. But I didn’t need individual subtitles in the movements. Let’s not forget that Mahler removed such things from his Symphony No. 3, mainly because he simply wanted his music to be heard (rather than processed). There’s a reason why more generic titles had a century or two of vogue in the classical world.

My  frustration with this matter may date back as far as elementary school, when I rarely heard what the composer intended me to hear. Even Flight of the Bumblebee: My first encounter with the piece was an assignment to draw what the music suggested to me. Well, it wasn’t bees but a manic fox running in circles.

As a mountain hiker  myself, I didn’t hear any of Mackey’s musical imagery. It’s a terrific multi-movement piece, sort of a crypto-viola concerto without the typical competitive relationship between soloist and ensemble. Often, I heard a profusion of disparate ideas that momentarily made me glad to be a musical American, because few other nationalities of composer would dare to put so many different things into a single musical collage. One recurring idea in several movements was what sounded like a child attempting to play harmonica, blowing in and out, creating a charming musical non-sequitur that certainly worked better than, for instance, the ocarinas heard in Ligeti’s Violin Concerto.

One movement was woven out of a pair of two-note motifs, Shostakovich-style – one that goes up, the other going down – that was as fine a feat of compositional invention as I’ve heard from Mackey. And that doesn’t really need any back story. The act of holding on to beauty – in the creation of his own – is why we were all there. I’d even venture that what the original beauty looked like is irrelevant.

In contrast, you would’ve wanted to know, in this day and age, what those gun shots were doing near the end of David Ludwig’s excellent Flowers in the Desert. As it turns out, the piece was prompted by the Oklahoma murder of a man who tried to hold up a drug store and, after being neutralized with a single shot from the pharmacist, was finished off with several more shots that killed him. The piece also contained a melody from the great 15^th-century composer Josquin des Pres that didn’t make me love it even more when the program notes explained what it was.

The composer in that program who really needs to go to Overexplainers Anonymous is Robert Paterson. His Loony Tunes had visual aids – the various cartoon characters on which individual movements were based. What I managed to notice about the music under these circumstances often sounded quite worthy, though the novelty and specificity of the cartoon visuals (Tweety Bird, et al.) greatly diminished the music that accompanied it.

What’s going on here? Composers want to be understood, and the more original ones, all too often, have left audiences baffled, and not because they have failed to compose well. But even deeper than that, this Explanationitis comes from an American sensibility that something must be useful in order to be valid. But beauty will never be useful in any concrete sense – even though many of us would simply die without it.

We’re in a different era now. Contemporary music concerts no longer have tiny friends-and-family audiences. This concert was packed with young people with standees in the back. More and more these days, you hear composers saying that their explanation of a piece should never be as long as the piece itself. But I think that’s giving them way too much leeway.

The legendary pianist, who died Wednesday at age 78 after a long struggle with liver cancer, was that kind of guy. In the years after his 1978 retirement from full-time concertizing, the way to engage him was not with some erudite conversation about music – such things seemed to pain him – but to discuss the latest movies and who might get the big prizes. He would just light right up. That’s not what the world expects from musicians who have been saddled with expectations of profundity.

Playing the right concerts at the right time – winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in Soviet Russia at the height of the Cold War – granted him evergreen fame that no other pianist had experienced. And he deserved it: his early recordings show a musician with an incredibly magnetic personality. (My favorite is not the Rachmaninoff/Tchaikovsky repertoire, but a Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 recorded live in Moscow.) But that kind of stardom is always constricting and sometimes fatal. And by no means was Cliburn the only one to endure fame’s fallout.

His generation of American pianists – Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman, Byron Janis (all born in 1928), Eugene Istomin (1925-2003) and Ruth Slenczynska (b. 1925) – often seemed to prove the F. Scott Fitzgerald dictum that there are no “second acts” in American lives. None of them, for one reason or another, had consistent careers, though those who went down first are the ones who came back and thrived the longest.

Cliburn’s career was effectively over in the late 1970s, when his playing had become not only slipshod but less emotionally committed. I attended two of his comeback performances – in 1989 with the Philadelphia Orchestra (his first concert in 11 years), and later at the start of a 1994 cross-country tour that began at the Hollywood Bowl.

In comeback No. 1, he played two concertos (Liszt and Tchaikovsky), though he began with The Star Spangled Banner (he was on such intimate terms with the national anthem that he referred to it as “The Banner”) and then recited a poem, a simple one, that told you where he was really at – not at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, but at some ladies’ musicale in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he was born.

For comeback No. 2, he hired an orchestra and booked dates working eastward across the US to Carnegie Hall, where he no doubt hoped to recapture former glory by playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3. But at the Hollywood Bowl, after a curiously long intermission, there came the announcement: Mr. Cliburn was suffering from dizzy spells and wasn’t up to playing the Rachmaninoff concerto, but he would play some works from his solo encore repertoire. At date after date, Cliburn fans wondered if he would pull together the Rachmaninoff for Carnegie Hall. He did not. Thereafter, he played sporadically on special occasions, but mainly tended the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

What happened? In one extended interview, he subscribed to the theory of absolute knowledge. Not only was the music he played classic, but so was his investigation of it. Once he hit the mark, he reached an interpretive end point and could only strive to keep hitting it at every subsequent performance.

His standards were high. Entire concertos lie in the RCA vaults unreleased (among them is a Schumann Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Charles Munch) because he wouldn’t approve them.  But is it any wonder that Cliburn was burned out by middle age? No new information, it seemed, was entering his musical psyche. How could he not grow stagnant?

His contemporaries all hit mid-life crises. Some 15 years ago, I set about looking for a common cause and attempted to interview all of them. Janis, who suffers from severe arthritis but still plays, found the subject so uncomfortable during a phone interview that he hung up on me. Both Graffman and Fleisher, on the other hand, had injuries that robbed them of the use of their right arms and were eager to raise public awareness of the causes.

Slenczynska ended her child-prodigy career at age 15, but had a major second career, eventually settling into quiet academia, though still playing concerts.  Istomin performed the most steadily, but he developed such free, flexible tempos that conductors died many deaths trying to follow him. Among interviewees, he was the most articulate on the subject of mid-career crises.

Roughly speaking, this was his theory: His was the first generation of big-career American pianists, achieving great success at a young age. With recording contracts and radio broadcasts, microphones were everywhere, seeming to demand technical perfection not expected of previous generations. Their reputations constantly preceded them. There were no minor concerts.

Though many of these pianists were carrying the mantle of the great Artur Schnabel, that paragon of musical integrity who could also be a hugely inaccurate player, they were secretly trying to keep up with Vladimir Horowitz (Janis and Graffman actually studied with him). Horowitz’s virtuosity was so unique that emulating it was bound to have all manner of side effects.

Yet each one had what even Fitzgerald might call second acts. Janis still has much to offer within a circumscribed repertoire; he has also written a number of Andrew Lloyd Webber-style musicals. After years of a serene domestic life while teaching at Southern Illinois University, Slenczynska lost her husband to lymphoma, moved to New York City and made regular visits to the Far East. Her last recording, made in 2009, was of Brahms’s late-period solo miniatures; it was among her finest achievements and is as great as any in this repertoire’s crowded discography.

Years of searching for cures finally paid off for Fleisher, who has returned to two-handed playing, though with intermittent success. (The Tokyo Quartet, for one, counts collaborations with Fleisher among its great moments.) In recent years, he premiered Paul Hindemith’s previously lost Piano Concerto for the Left Hand – a major contribution to the repertoire.

After Graffman could no longer play with his right arm, he accepted his fate graciously, played left-hand repertoire and ran the Curtis Institute of Music, where he taught Lang Lang and Yuja Wang. Now, he still plays – between frequent trips to China where he collects art with a passion. But the most perfect matched set is Graffman himself with his wife Naomi. He may be the most contented human being I’ve ever met.

And Cliburn? His piano competition is certainly a second act. But there was evidence of more. Two years ago when I was in Fort Worth for some work relating to the event, Van himself came by, making eye contact with everybody, always with a pleasantry to put you at ease. All speeches received not only his compliments but a request for a printed copy that he could enjoy later.

Van Cliburn’s natural sweetness was such that he no longer needed to play piano in order to be adored. That’s a second act one could certainly aspire to.

The old stereotype of the emerging Russian pianist was fast, loud and so physically massive that the New Yorker once ran a cartoon showing a Carnegie Hall-ish poster of a grizzly bear next to a tiny keyboard reduced to rubble.

Not so with Daniil Trifonov, the slim, courtly 21-year-old winner of the Tchaikovsky Competition – even if he does require a piano tuner at intermission. But like many of his generation, he is making his name on his brains rather than his fingers. He can play with the best of them. But the centerpiece of his recent recital tour was the Chopin Preludes Op. 28 (recorded live by Deutsche Grammophon at Carnegie Hall, though I heard him Feb. 7 at Princeton’s McCarter Theater – a highly congenial place for classical concerts). Indeed, Chopin’s series of fragmentary miniatures achieve haiku-like eloquence only among the wise, worldly and  middle aged but also did so with young Trifonov.

Now, Bach’s Goldberg Variations are a near-standard calling card for the youngest of the young. The latest is trend seems to be the far more formidable task of performing complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas. Maybe the Korean pianist HJ Lim didn’t record the best cycle out there when she made her EMI debut with a complete set of the 32 sonatas at age 24 last year, but it showed there’s plenty of talent to be developed in the future and set the world talking. The more seasoned Stewart Goodyear, who for some reason was typed as a Gershwin specialist early on, is playing all 32 in one day in Princeton this spring, having already recorded them all.

A decade ago, Lang Lang, now the grand old man of the pianistic youth culture, was auditioning not with the barnburners he’s now known for but an elegant Haydn sonata and Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No.1, which worked so well that his supposedly career-making fill-in for Andre Watts in Chicago was more an inevitability than a breakthrough. One could argue that Jeremy Denk built his career as much through his marvelously well-written blog as he did with spellbinding performances of the Charles Ives Concord Sonata. Even though Yuja Wang is playing lots of big standard works these days (somebody has to), she made early, important debuts with the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4. I first heard her playing Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 10 – sublimely.

Trifonov ‘s generation also includes Jan Lisiecki, the 17-year-old Polish/Canadian pianist who made his Deutsche Grammophon recording debut with a pair of Mozart concertos and Ingolf Wunder (yet another DG guy, age 27, who tied for second place in the 2010 Chopin International Competition ahead of Trifonov in third place) whose latest album is a tribute to Vladimir Horowitz that includes Scarlatti and Mozart sonatas that the Russian icon saved for his old age. All are triumphing left and right – and have every reason to. Trifonov even sold out Carnegie Hall, which happens rather seldom with solo keyboard recitals.

They do sometimes show their age – and if they didn’t, one might suspect that they’re artistic space aliens. Hunched over the keyboard not unlike Olli Mustonen, Trifonov’s best moments of poetic insight, sometimes breathtaking, were often in the final seconds that sum up what had come before in each tiny Chopin prelude, like an elegant stroke of Japanese calligraphy. In Liszt’s Sonata in b, he went to all the emotional extremes, laudably, because he could while maintaining an overall sense of architecture that kept the music from ever seeming episodic. Each reiteration of the piece’s recurring motifs had their own meaning and coloring.

Amid all of this, though, he often forgets about surface beauty altogether with a sound that can be non-descript and lacking in depth. Most youthful of all, he rarely meets a note he doesn’t love and insists that you hear them all with a clarity almost equal to that of Marc-Andre Hamelin, but maybe not the taste to use that quality wisely. In the Piano Sonata No. 2 of Scriabin (a composer who always needs a certain amount of organizational intervention), Trifonov lacked prioritization, with wave after wave of notes that gave you little sense of what to hear first. Same thing in the Liszt transcription of Schumann’s great song Widmung: Liszt gussied it up no end, probably under the belief that you need to do something when no singer is present. But smart pianists are singers of sorts who can give the melodic line detailed poetic meaning and make sure the bells and whistles don’t get in the way. Trifonov’s reading was aggressively ornamental. Even this problem, though, is an extremely high-quality one.

As for the other pianists: I recently caught a broadcast of Lisiecki playing the Schumann Piano Concerto with the New York Philharmonic – with passages that came bursting out of the composer’s Biedermeier-era surfaces as if to gratuitously remind you that Schumann did die in a madhouse.

Wunder’s elegance and poetic intelligence makes him perhaps one of the most well-rounded talent among them. Many pianists can play the kind of scintillating Scarlatti heard on his new album Ingolf Wunder 300, but almost none of them play Mozart sonatas in ways so relaxed and genial – and with such an ingratiating legato. But in the Horowitzian spirit of outrageously theatrical transcriptions, Wunder presents John Williams’ theme from Star Wars, perhaps not realizing that such anthem like movie music means to be pithy and repetitive and don’t always leave much room for thematic development needed when the piece is taken out of context and put in a concert setting.

The one pianist of this crowd who just might be an artistic space alien is Benjamin Grosvenor, a 20-year-old Brit I’ve follow assiduously in broadcasts all over Europe, as well as on his new Decca-label album featuring the Saint-Saens Piano Concerto No. 2 and Ravel Piano Concerto in G. Never have I not heard him boldly re-imagining the music he plays in ways that made complete sense, had conviction right down to the smallest detail but was completely unlike anything I’ve previously heard.

How such depth of brilliance could be housed by somebody so young is enough to make you believe that reincarnation can come with accumulated wisdom. One instance of how my extravagant claims are manifested in sound is heard in the Ravel concerto: Any longtime Ravel listener notices the composer’s lace-like approach toward motivic development in patterns of three. The motif is played twice (the second with a slight variation) though the third statement is more radically transformed and often leads the way to the next motivic trio.

Grosvenor’s performance makes note of that constantly in ways both macro and micro. I particularly love the big, jazzy glissando gesture in the first movement: Usually it’s played as a single flourish, though Grosvenor breaks it down, ever so subtly, into the usual motivic trio with two added echoes. Yet the gesture never feels pulled apart or dissected. It simply reveals itself to you with a sharp focus you’ve never heard before.

During the heyday of Carlos Kleiber, it was often said that the conductor “makes us all into virgins” for his ability to make you hear standard repertoire as if for the first time. Much the same could be said about a good 80 percent of the performances I’ve heard from Grosvenor. I’d even trust him with a Star Wars transcription. But the fact that he doesn’t ask me to make me trust him more.