The original 1915 El Amor Brujo, a gitaneria with dialogue, song, and dance, is unwieldy. The subsequent orchestral suite is fluent, but squanders the work's gypsy soul. PostClassical Ensemble's new staging of El Amor Brujo last weekend in DC was an attempt to restore the narrative and dance components without the words and stage detail encumbering the original version. Also, we used the original 1915 instrumentation - 15 players. It's actually preferable - an amazing exercise in instrumentation/orchestration, eschewing the plushness of the 1925 ballet score. And for the songs we engaged not an operatic mezzo, but a famous flamenco cantaora from Seville: Esperanza Fernandez.

The orchestra was onstage behind a scrim, used for projections and lighting design. There were eight black-clad dancers. The ingenious director/choreographer was Igal Perry, from New York's Peridance Contemporary Dance Company. Esperanza was also choreographed. The Washington Post found the result "profoundly memorable."

In fact, we believe we have succeeded in creating a viable stage version Amor Brujo. As there are no sets, and the dancers only require fifteen feet of stage depth, we hope to tour it internationally.

El Amor Brujo was presented in collaboration with Georgetown University on a double bill with Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale, also fully staged. The two works were also coupled in 1925. They resonate in revealing ways. Falla, acknowledging the influence of Stravinsky on his own work, wrote of Stravinsky's "primitivism" This is a term one could hardly apply to El Amor Brujo as it's usually purveyed. But with a gypsy singing and gesticulating onstage, with the pared orchestration, with the austere flamenco influences on both music and plot brought into play, Falla's appropriation of cante jondo proves gritty. This is a composer whose little home, fastidiously preserved in Granada near the Alhambra, is compact and severe. He lived ascetically with his sister. Stravinsky called him "painfully religious."

The "Falla" we mainly know has wandered far from Falla.

Notwithstanding its importance as a showplace for rich boxholders -- Mrs. Caroline Astor, who regularly came late and left early, was called a "walking chandelier" -- the early Metropolitan Opera was a conductor's house. During its "German seasons" (1884-1891), the dominant composer was Wagner and the dominant performer was Wagner's protégé Anton Seidl, presiding in the pit. Not so long after, Mahler and Toscanini dominated the Met's artistic identity. After World War I, the Italian wing was entrusted to Tullio Serafin and then Ettore Panizza, the German wing to Artur Bodanzky. Panizza and Bodanzky are largely forgotten today. How I wish the Met's radio broadcasts would feature their broadcast recordings. Panizza's Verdi, Bodanzky's Wagner were incendiary, and the orchestra was a powderkeg -- more explosive than any such ensemble to be heard today. (Just listen to Panizza's 1938 "Otello" with Martinelli, Tibbett, and Rethberg, or Bodanzky's 1937 "Siegfried" with Melchior, Schorr, and Flagstad -- two of the supreme examples of operatic art ever documented in sound.)

Much later, in the final phase of Rudolf Bing's regime after the 1966 move to Lincoln Center, the Met was a house without great conductors. The orchestra was variable, the chorus worse. This was the setting for James Levin's appointment as music director in 1975. Levine swiftly turned the orchestra into a reliably impressive instrument. The chorus improved beyond recognition. The repertoire was refreshed. In 2009, Levine concurrently took over the Boston Symphony. But a physical decline set in -- his Met performances (never light-footed) turned massive and slack. Last September, the Met announced that Levine was bowing out of the fall's new productions of "Don Giovanni" and "Siegfried" because of emergency surgery for a damaged vertebra. He would be replaced by Fabio Luisi -- who was in the same instant named Principal Conductor. As of this writing, Levine is scheduled to return to duty in the spring -- but no one knows if he really can. And so five seasons into Peter Gelb's eventful tenure as General Manager, the company is negotiating a transition in musical authority.

Though Luisi first appeared at the Met in 2005, he remains little known in the US. He was music director of the Dresden Staatskapelle from 2007 to 2010. He takes over the Zurich Opera in 2012-13. The Met is about glamour; Luisi is not glamorous. He defers to the orchestra when he takes his bows. He doesn't smile at the audience. But he has won over the musicians. The best thing about the new "Don Giovanni and "Siegfried" productions is Luisi's way of conducting the latter, and the orchestra's way of playing it. He is the first conductor other than Levine to lead "Siegfried" at the Met since 1981. Before that, there was Erich Leinsdorf. To my ears, Luisi is a superior Wagnerian to either Levine or Leinsdorf. He achieves a striking refinement of style and sonority. His command is complete but never throttling. The balances between stage and pit are at all times impeccable. In the new "Siegfried," the most memorable moments occur during the act one exchange between Mime and the Wanderer. Luisi seals the Wanderer's music with a seamless majesty. Preparing Bryn Terfel's descriptions of the gods and of the Volsungs, he achieves an unforgettable poetic hush.

But the talk in the lobby is about Robert Lepage's production. This is the third installment of the Lepage "Ring," with its high tech projections and mobile metallic slabs. His virtual-reality special effects include running water, floating leaves, slimy worms, scampering rodents, and a Forest Bird that sits in Siegfried's lap. The production works best where it is least intrusive: act one. In act two, the shallow playing space vitiates the expansiveness of Wagner's forest; the dragon, if impressively large and animated, is neither frightening nor poignant. In act three, the magic fire frames Siegfried's entire scene with Brȕnnhilde. Wagner asks that it disappear after Siegfried penetrates the flames for a reason: the mountaintop he attains trembles with a preternatural stillness, a preamble to apocalyptic events. This is but one example of Lepage's failure to listen. Directing his singers in this final scene -- the most psychologically complex duet in all opera -- he is clueless. The steep rake of Brȕnnhilde's "rock" doesn't help. Only Gerhard Siegel, a terrific Mime, is consistently effective in keeping the opera's trajectory moving.

For "Don Giovanni" to succeed in a 4,000-seat house, it requires either an ensemble of larger-than-life vocal personalities, or an interpretation with a sharp edge. Mahler's revelatory Met "Don Giovanni" of 1908, with a cast including Scotti, Chaliapin, Bonci, Eames, Gadski, and Sembrich, doubtless had both. The Met's new "Don Giovanni," directed by Michael Grandage, has neither. Remarkably, the strongest performance comes from the weakest character. Though Don Ottavio is a milquetoast, Ramon Vargas's portrayal is so exquisite, vocally, that he steals the show. Both his great arias are delivered with exemplary diction, with pianissimo tones sustained on the breath, with elongated phrasings guided by Luisi in the pit. Grandage, a redoubtable director of plays, shows no signs of high operatic competence. Physically, the production is monotonous. The dancing at Zerlina's wedding and Don Giovanni's feast is over-choreographed. Inexplicably, the staging of the Don's descent into hell is given away by the preceding statue scene: the only surprise is the duration of the conflagration.

This season, Luisi also conducts "Manon" and "La traviata." The Met is a company in need of strong artistic leadership. Luisi exerts authority quietly and inconspicuously. The possible parameters of his institutional vision are as yet unknowable. Will he be a fit? One hopes so.

In fact, this decade-long series of exchanges between Gustav and Alma, cannily interspersed with Alma's diary entries, reads like a play.

For the Pacific Symphony's performances of Mahler's Ninth Symphony a week ago, I had the opportunity to turn the Gustav/Alma correspondence into a half-hour pre-concert playlet, with two gifted actors: Nick Ullett and Jennie O'Hara. The audience responded volubly -- and, in the case of Gustav's marriage demands, incredulously.

Mahler, on Dec. 1901, 1902, composes 2,000 words setting forth such conditions as:

"From now on you have only one profession: to make me happy! Do you understand, Alma? I do realize that if you are to make me happy, you yourself must be happy. But in this drama, which could develop equally well into a comedy or a tragedy, the roles must be correctly cast. The role of the 'composer,' the 'bread-winner,' is mine; yours is that of the loving partner, the sympathetic comrade. Are you satisfied with it? I am asking much of you, very much - but I can and must do so, because I also know what I have to offer (and shall offer) in return. Almschi, I beg you, read this letter carefully. Before we speak again, we must have clarified everything, you must know what I demand and expect of you, and what I can give in return - what you must be for me. . . . I bless you, my dearest love, no matter how you react - I shall not write tomorrow, but wait instead for your letter on Saturday. A servant will be sent round and kept waiting in readiness. Many tender kisses, my Alma. And I beg you: Be truthful! Your Gustav."

"This letter!" Alma responds. "My heart missed a beat - give up my music - abandon what until now has been my life. My first reaction was - to pass him up. I had to weep - for then I realized that I loved him. Mama and I talked it over till late at night. She had read the letter. I find his behavior so ill-considered, so inept. It might have come all of its own, quite gently. But likely this will leave an indelible scar."

Then the tables turn: Alma falls in love with Walter Gropius. Mahler rescinds his demands. He now writes:

"My darling, I am possessed by dark spirits; they have cast me to the ground. Come and dispel them. Abide by me, my rod and staff. Come soon today, that I may rise up. Here I lie prostrate and await you; and silently I ask whether I may still hope for salvation, or whether I am to be damned. . . . Almschli, if you had left me, I would simply have been snuffed out, like a candle starved of air. When will you be arriving, dear heart? As you know, I am a schoolboy at heart, but a trace of the husband, or whatever you prefer to call it, still remains, and that part of me wishes for news of my dearest! But I'm longing for you! Longing! Longing!"

In fact, the Pacific Symphony's "Music Unwound" presentations of Mahler's Ninth included two prefatory segments -- the second of which, at concert-time, was a mini-lecture by conductor Carl St. Clair combined with three Ruckert Songs (memorably sung by Chris Nomura) and a tape-recorded reminiscence of her father by Anna Mahler, from the 1960s.

As notable as what all this incorporated was what it did without: the orchestra was not onstage until 8:50. That is: no excerpts from Mahler's Ninth were performed. Rather, the entire exercise was one of contextualization: creating conditions for maximum emotional and intellectual engagement. The vast majority of the listeners had never before encountered this long and challenging work. A propitious ambience was secured. And the impact of 100 musicians purveying Mahler was reserved for the performance itself.

St. Clair pursued a similar strategy contextualizing Bruckner's Ninth last season -- a "Music Unwound" concert I wrote about at the time. What this conductor -- a ripe and impassioned advocate of music of the spirit -- has achieved is a listening sanctum the more remarkable (and necessary) given the Pacific Symphony's locale: California's Orange County. He has successfully negated the freeway experience preceding the symphonic experience. He has found a way to slow the speedy, fractured pace of daily lives, to ease his audience into fresh and unexpected realms of personal adventure.

The rapt silence accorded Mahler's symphony -- 90 minutes long in St. Clair's fraught rendering -- registered discovery. Many stayed post-concert, nearly until midnight, to share their discoveries in intimate detail. A community of listeners was created and sustained.

"Music Unwound" -- creative contextualization -- feels necessary: something many orchestras should attempt. In Orange County, it's supported by the NEH and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Orchestras elsewhere lack comparable subsidies. But maybe all they need is a push. "Music Unwound" doesn't require expensive soloists. More often than not, there is less music to rehearse. One can't generalize that it's more expensive than business as usual.

Meanwhile, I'm going to expand my playlet into a full evening, with interpolated music by Gustav and Alma both.

The central presentation, "Charles Ives: A Life in Music," applied letters and other writings to an array of Ives songs (peerlessly enacted by William Sharp) and chamber-orchestra works, plus "The Alcotts" from the Concord Piano Sonata (an exalted performance by Jeremy Denk).

The central document was the "Dear Daddy" letter Edie Ives gave her father on his sixty-eighth birthday, reading in part:

"You have fire and imagination that is truly a divine spark, but to me the great thing is that never once have you tried to turn your gift to your own ends. Instead you have continually given to humanity right from your heart, asking nothing in return; -- and all too often getting nothing. The thing that makes me happiest about your recognition today is to see the bread you have so generously cast upon most ungrateful waters, finally beginning to return to you. All that great love is flowing back to you at last. Don't refuse it because it comes so late, Daddy."

When the evening was done, an audience member asked how our presentation could be reconciled with popular imagery of Ives the man: irascible, cranky, difficult.

That Ives' music cannot be fully appreciated outside the context of 19th century gentility, and the genteel notion that art is morally empowering, has long seemed obvious to me. Moral fire is what Ives found and cherished in Emerson -- and also in Beethoven, whom he considered "in the history of this youthful world the best product that human beings can boast of." But I hadn't sufficiently appreciated the implications for Ives the man.

When Ives was belatedly discovered in the thirties, forties, and fifties, modernists seized on the bravery of Ives the composer - his experiments with tonality, rhythm, and sound. Concomitantly, they seized on his tirades against "pansies" and "sissies" to paint Ives the man. That Ives was confrontational suited the modernist template for genius.

But in what others had to say about him, I can find no evidence of Ives being remotely cruel or selfish. In fact, it seems he was singularly benign. At the Ives & Myrick insurance office, he may have been considered eccentric, but he was beloved.

Many are the stories memorably limning Ives the man. One of my favorites was told by Charles Buesing, an Ives & Myrick employee. Buesing remembered Ives as "a very shy, retiring man." He was "very kindly," never harsh or angry. He "would talk to anyone." He "made everyone feel important." The first time Buesing entered Ives's office - which was "out of sight," "around a corner" -- he thought Ives asleep. His eyes were shut, his feet rested on a desk drawer, his desk was a mass of papers. "Come in and sit down," Ives said, his eyes still closed. He asked Buesing about his family, his work, his future plans. He encouraged him to stick with the life insurance business.

One day, an Ives & Myrick salesman named Charlie came to Buesing with tears in his eyes. Charlie had gone months without a sale: he had no income. Ives had just paid him a visit. "Charlie," Ives had said, "will you take out your wallet?" Charlie did. "Now, you open it," said Ives. The wallet was empty. "I thought so," said Ives. "No one can ever make a sale of anything with an empty wallet. Now, I want you to take this as a business loan. I know you'll have so much confidence with what I am going to put in that wallet that you will pay me back, and I don't want an I.O.U. or anything else." And Ives put fifty dollars in Charlie's wallet. As Ives left the office, Charlie said to Buesing, "There is a great man." Politically, Ives was an extreme populist who advocated direct democracy. He believed in people.

In Beethoven, writes Ives in Essays before a Sonata, "the moral and the intellectual" are one. "It is told, and the story is so well known that we hesitate to repeat it here, that [Beethoven and Goethe] were standing in the street one day when the Emperor drove by - Goethe, like the rest of the crowd, bowed and uncovered - but Beethoven stood bolt upright, and refused even to salute, saying; : "Let him bow to us, for ours is a nobler empire." Goethe's mind knew this was true, but his moral courage was not instinctive."

Like Ives, like Emerson, Beethoven embodies ideals of uplift and equality - and yet will not pander. His language grows arcane. Ives knows this paradox and solves it: Beethoven writes symphonies "to the people," not "for the people"; he composes "for the human-soul," not for the "human-ear." In fact, with their Beethoven encomiums, the Concord Sonata and Ives' accompanying Essays Before a Sonata mutually testify that Ives saw himself striding alongside Emerson and Beethoven in a common high endeavor -- that the human, morally empowered, might become divine.

While I cannot agree that Porgy and Bess is any more crippled than, say, Fidelio or Der Rosenkavalier (very uneven works, it seems to me), I would like to know what a Gershwin purist looks like or might have to say. With the possible exception of Johann Sebastian Bach, I cannot think of another composer so inherently subject to a range of interpretive possibilities.

Working for some time on a book on Gershwin and Rouben Mamoulian (who ingeniously directed the first Porgy and Bess), I have taken to calling Gershwin "culturally fluid" - by which I mean that (like Mamoulian) he does not hierarchize "high" and "popular" genres. Concomitantly, his music is interpretively fluid. The first recordings of Porgy and Bess were made in 1935 by white opera singers: Helen Jepson and Lawrence Tibbett - and Tibbett's "Oh Bess, Where is My Bess?" is the most searing version I know. Seven years later, Avon Long, who sang Sportin' Life on stage, credibly recorded some of Porgy's songs with the Leo Reisman Orchestra. At the Hollywood Bowl Gershwin Memorial Concert (September 8, 1937), Ruby Elzy, the opera's original Serena, delivered an unforgettable "My Man's Gone Now" combining the bluesy inflections of a Billie Holiday with a sustained climax on the aria's high B the likes of which I have never heard equaled. Billie Holiday herself recorded a memorably zestful "Summertime."

In his indispensable handbook on Rhapsody in Blue (1972), David Schiff incontrovertibly opines that this is a composition with no definitive form. Schiff adds: "The Rhapsody cannot be played as written. Performers either have to reconstruct an evanescent 'authentic' style of performance, or have the courage to image a new one." Gershwin's own recordings irresistibly apply his bright, quick piano style. Leonard Bernstein's stately, massive Rhapsody in Blue could also be irresistible. My own favorite pianist in this work is Genadi Zagor, a Russian who combines a life-long jazz sensibility with the technical equipment demanded by a Rachmaninoff concerto. Zagor's Rhapsody in Blue, I would say, is equally "Russian" (thunderous sonorities; incessant dabs of color and nuance) and "American" (he improvises the solos, insouciantly migrating through a range of jazz piano styles).

Blogging about Zagor's Rhapsody in Blue following his performance with Post-Classical Ensemble at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center (College Park) last September, I went so far as to say: "I was not the only listener for whom [Zagor's performance] registered as an enhancement of what Gershwin set down. Rhapsody in Blue can seem a truncated work. Genadi's final mega-cadenza mightily prepared the Big Tune (so redolent of Tchaikovsky's anRomeo and Juliet). The Rhapsody re-emerged kindred to a full-brown concerto whose 25-minute length seemed a fit for its materials and trajectory."

I reiterate this opinion because this same terrific 2010 performance will be broadcast over the Sirius XM Satellite network Sept. 9 (8 pm EST on Symphony 76), Sept. 10 (7 pm EST on Classical Pops 75), and Sept. 11 (11 pm EST on Classical Pops 75). Also, Zagor plays Gershwin (including an improvisation on Rhapsody in Blue) at a leading Washington, D.C., jazz club, the Bohemian Caverns, on September 22. And on October 8 he opens with Green Bay Symphony season with Rhapsody in Blue.

As for Porgy and Bess, it has proved the most durable opera ever created, judged by the variety of uses to which it has successfully been put; the first Broadway productions (in 1935 and 1941) were already fundamentally different from one another, and neither offered the opera as Gershwin composed it. There are limits to its "fluidity," I am sure (I have not seen the new Boston production). But if ever there was a major twentieth century composer whose notes on paper are susceptible to dizzy excursions, high and low, it can only be Mr. G.

"Dear Daddy,

"You are so very modest and sweet Daddy, that I don't think you realize the full import of the words people use about you, 'A great man.'

"Daddy, I have had a chance to see so many men lately -- fine fellows, and no doubt the cream of our generation. But I have never in all my life come across one who could measure up to the fine standard of life and living and you believe in, and that I have always seen you put into action no matter how many counts were against you. You have fire and imagination that is truly a divine speak, but to me the great thing is that never once have you tried to turn your gift to your own ends. Instead you have continually given to humanity right from your heart, asking nothing in return; -- and all too often getting nothing. The thing that makes me happiest about your recognition today is to see the bread you have so generously cast upon most ungrateful waters, finally beginning to return to you. All that great love is flowing back to you at least. Don't refuse it because it comes so late, Daddy."

When I first encountered Edie's letter, in Tom Owens' ChSelected Correspondence of Charles Ives (2007), I knew it had to become part of a public presentation. I realized, in an instant, that Ives -- himself a writer of distinction -- was a prime candidate for a concert with actors that would mutually illuminate Ives the man and Ives the composer. The result is "Charles Ives: A Life in Music," which this November launches Post-Classical Ensemble's 2011-2012 season as part of a three-day "Ives Project."

In the eight years since Angel Gil-Ordonez and I founded Post-Classical Ensemble in Washington, D.C., we have worked to consolidate its mission as an "experimental laboratory" for the symphonic field. Thanks in part to a $200,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we can now maximize our partnerships -- with Georgetown University, with the National Gallery of Art Film Division, with the Music Center at Strathmore -- in pursuit of new concert strategies.

With George Gershwin, Ives is arguably the supreme creative genius to grace the narrative of American classical music. But, as with Gershwin, his impact is glancing at best. And, as not with Gershwin, his music remains little known to the musical public at large. "The Ives Project," hosted by Strathmore, engages the pianist Jeremy Denk and the baritone William Sharp (both supreme Ives advocates) in a strategy for better acquainting American audiences with the cranky Ives idiom -- for penetrating its assaultive exterior, for its forbidding crankiness, for connecting to its warm heart and soul. The Project includes songs, chamber works, and the Concord Sonata; letters, essays, and historic recordings; and lecture/recitals by both Denk and Sharp.

Post-Classical Ensemble's other principal 2011-2012 projects are "Falla/Stravinsky" (Nov. 26-27; December 3-4) and "Schubert Uncorked" (March 24 and 31).
"Falla/Stravinsky" is a double bill: full stagings of Falla's El Amor Brujo and Stravinsky's A Soldier's Tale.

Over the years, my experience producing various versions of El Amor Brujo has been fulfilling and frustrating in equal measure. This magnificent flamenco appropriation doesn't really work in its original stage version, and the orchestral suite we know sacrifices potent dance and narrative dimensions. So Post-Classical Ensemble has engaged a master choreographer -- Igal Perry -- to choreograph the suite, streamlining the story and stripping away the dialogue. Our vocal soloist will be Esperanza Fernandez -- a legendary gypsy cantaora. There will be six dancers. The orchestra will be onstage. The production premieres Dec. 3 and 4 at Georgetown University; we intend to tour it.

"Schubert Uncorked" continues our collaboration with one of the world's premiere instrumentalists -- the uncategorizable bass trombone virtuoso David Taylor, who most recently performed with us at the Kennedy Center, inflicting his inimitable version of Schubert's "Der Doppelganger." For "Schubert Uncorked," at Georgetown University next spring, Taylor will premiere his own version of Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata, transformed into the first-ever classical trombone concerto.

Both "Falla/Stravinsky" and "Schubert Uncorked" link to film events at the National Gallery of Art. For full information, click here.

Today, 37 years later, Rachmaninoff is an expanding twenty-first century presence. Shunned by modernists for deficits in originality and influence, he is newly admired alongside other twentieth-century Romantics. In fact, he possessed a musical personality so strong he could not possibly have failed to create (however unfashionably) a voice of his own. And we have begun to listen to this voice with fresh fascination. When in 1997 the ubiquitous Third Piano Concerto was attacked in The New York Times as "a cozy piece of schlock," an eminent musicologist, Joseph Kerman, rose to Rachmaninoff's defense in The New York Review of Books. "Novel, persuasive, expressive" was Kerman's shrewd revisionist verdict, surveying the structure of the concerto's vast first movement.

My own Rachmaninoff epiphany occurred a decade or so ago when I found myself listening on a car radio to a 1934 Rachmaninoff piece I thought I knew -- the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini -- and thinking: this is at least as good as anything Stravinsky was writing in, say, the 1940s. It partakes in the Stravinskyan virtues: concision, piquant scoring, rhythmic variety. And (of course) it conveys a distinctive emotional charge Stravinsky shuns.

In contradistinction to the twentieth century icons Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Rachmaninoff was long debunked as a composer who never evolved, whose decades in exile were a creative wasteland. It's true his compositional output plummeted after he left Russia in 1917. There are only five pieces. But the Rhapsody is one of them - it's the Rachmaninoff concerto for people who don't like No. 2.

And the Symphonic Dances of 1940 - Rachmaninoff's last opus - may be his magnum opus. Certainly, it's his valedictory, a musical testament whose keynote is metaphysical intensity. The three movements originally bore titles: "Midday," "Twilight," and "Midnight." These are stations of life. The finale ends in a blaze of glory, effacing strains of Dies Irae; near the close, the composer inscribes: "Alliluya."

I'm barely familiar with the Three Russian Songs for chorus and orchestra (1926). I don't have strong feelings about the Corelli Variations (1931). The Third Symphony (1936) seems to me a work whose long gestation betrays failing inspiration. The case of the Fourth Piano Concerto, which underwent alteration over a period of 15 years, is far more tantalizing. Having for the first time encountered the original 1926 version - released for publication by the Rachmaninoff Estate in 2000 and rarely heard since -- via Texas' Round Top Festival, I still find the melodic material for the middle movement banal. In the outer movements, however, Rachmaninoff's diminishing melodic gift translates as a kind of virtue: they bristle with interesting material, deployed in surprising ways. In Eteri Andjaparidze's potent Round Top performance, the concerto lasted fully eight minutes longer than Rachmaninoff's own 1941 recording of the final, 1941 version, with its slashing abridgements. No less than Rachmaninoff the composer, this concerto, once consigned to oblivion, is music that will not go away.

And then there is "early Rachmaninoff." Only recently has his 50-minute First Symphony (1895) entered the outskirts of the repertoire. It is heroic confessional music: a successor to the big Tchaikovsky symphonies, as different from the second and third Rachmaninoff symphonies as the Tchaikovsky suites are from the Pathetique.

Rachmaninoff destroyed the First Symphony after its disastrous premiere. My guess is that this volcanic effusion violated his intense privacy. He could not have anticipated that the score would be discovered in Russia long after his death. The most piercing, most poignant moment in all of Rachmaninoff is the coda to the first movement of the Symphonic Dances, which pacifies the "vengeance" motto that ultimately pounds the First Symphony into silence. This private allusion - the First Symphony was wholly unknown in 1940 - is a closing of the circle, the completion of an unlikely creative odyssey, courageously aloof from contemporary fashion and taste, begun in pre-revolutionary Russia and ending, Russian still, in southern California.

The previous week, Round Top offered a performance of the original, unabridged version of Rachmaninoff's little-heard Fourth Piano Concerto with a world-class soloist: Eteri Andjaparidze. Other symphonic programs his summer include an homage to Diaghilev (Poulenc, Respighi, Stravinsky), Roussel's The Spider's Feast, and Christopher Rouse's Flute Concerto alongside more standard fare. The chamber concerts (with faculty artists) are a cornucopia of delicacies: the composers include Faure, Poulenc, Ligeti, Enescu, and Schoenberg (the Chamber Symphony No. 1).

The Round Top musicians are selected by blind audition from schools and conservatories across the US. The average age is 22. They spend six weeks at Round Top on full scholarship. The faculty of 44 - I took part for a week as a Mahler lecturer - includes principal players from prominent American orchestras. As Round Top, Texas, is in the middle of nowhere - both Austin and Houston are more than an hour away -- a sense of community is assured.

The festival's longtime program director, Alain Declert, is an inimitable yet much imitated Frenchman charmingly disposed to vehement opinion. The founder and artistic director is the pianist James Dick, whose civility and warmth pervade the premises. Incredibly, he conceived the notion of a music festival in Round Top fully forty years ago. Two years later, a large portable outdoor stage was moved to Round Top from Minnesota. The current 1,000-seat concert hall is acoustically distinguished and architecturally unique.

What the Round Top oasis portends for its gifted beneficiaries is a good question. There are far more aspirants than orchestral jobs in the world outside. One can only hope that orchestras and musicians alike will find ways to think constructively about institutions and instrumentalists whose responsibilities must and will expand in the decades ahead.

The NEH public programs division funds orchestras once every decade or two. That the Humanities Endowment is not accustomed to dealing with orchestras, and that orchestras are not prone to apply for NEH funding, identifies in a nutshell the challenges and opportunities the new grant addresses.

"Music Unwound" funds a consortium comprising the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Louisville Orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony, and the Pacific Symphony. All four orchestras will undertake a "Dvorak and America" project that explore the ways in which culture has helped Americans to understand and define themselves. Two of the orchestras will additionally undertake a "Copland and Mexico" project that targets Hispanic audiences, and uses Copland's Mexican epiphany (a Mexico City dance hall transformed him into a populist) as a means of discovering Silvestre Revueltas (a master Mexican composer next to whose elemental sound mosaics Copland's El Salon Mexico is the confection of a skilled beginner).

The projects incorporate actors, a video artist, and a variety of art and cultural historians. They link to museums and universities, middle and high schools. Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha and the paintings of Frederic Church, the Mexican Revolution and the murals of Diego Rivera are among the topics at hand. Its cross-disciplinary intensity is what qualifies "Music Unwound" for Humanities funding.

"I'm a firm believer that people don't know what they like; they like what they know," comments Louisville Orchestra CEO Rob Birman. "'Music Unwound' could serve as a model for American orchestras long into the future. The landscape of the American orchestral experience is crying out for something new, something with greater impact, more context and relevance for younger audiences. 'Music Unwound' delivers as array of entry points through which listeners of all ages can engage with orchestras across artistic disciplines."

Jesse Rosen, President of the League of American Orchestras, calls "Music Unwound" a project "of the utmost significance not only to the participating organizations but to the evolution of programming and audience building."

As project director of "Music Unwound," I was able to build upon two previous NEH initiatives I've directed. The first was a "National Education Project" that created a young readers book (my Dvorak in America) and interactive DVD (by Robert Winter and Peter Bogdanoff) treating Dvorak's American sojourn as a springboard for cross-disciplinary instruction. The second was a Teacher-Training Institute (hosted by the Pittsburgh Symphony) that trained 25 teachers (grades 3 to 12) to use the Dvorak story to infuse the humanities into Social Studies, Music, and English Literature classrooms. Four alumni of the institute will partner "Music Unwound" in Buffalo, North Carolina, and Orange County (California).

The "Music Unwound" rubric is an invention of the Pacific Symphony, long a national leader in thematic symphonic programming. Perhaps the most novel of the NEH-funded Dvorak projects will be undertaken by the Pacific Symphony Youth Orchestra. This may be the first time an American youth orchestra has presented a thematic program with film and narration in combination with (1) classroom-style instruction for the instrumentalists themselves (who will learn about Longfellow, Buffalo Bill, and yellow journalism in the context of Dvorak's American sojourn); and (2) visits to local high schools by the young instrumentalists (who will perform and discuss Dvorak's American String Quartet).

A starting point for "Music Unwound" was a "Dvorak and America" program I wrote and produced for the New York Philharmonic with the participation of Alec Baldwin and Marin Alsop. That was part of a special "Inside the Music" series the Philharmonic undertook for a couple of seasons. The "Music Unwound" programs, by comparison, are not ancillary: they all fall within the central subscription series of the participating orchestras. They point eagerly to the future.

Our new century has produced, in ever growing numbers, "post-classical" musicians who migrate serendipitously among musical worlds once treated as distinct. In rare cases, they are restless virtuosos who concomitantly explore new instrumental possibilities and new repertoire. Taylor is a questing post-classical musician of this type: edgy, flamboyant, reckless, experimental.

While studying at Juilliard, Taylor was a member of Leopold Stokowski's American Symphony, and occasionally played with the New York Philharmonic under Pierre Boulez. Shortly after, he joined the Thad Jones Jazz band. He recorded with Duke Ellington and with the Rolling Stones. He has since been closely associated with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Gil Evans Big Band, and the Charles Mingus Big Band. He has performed chamber music with Winton Marsalis, Yo-Yo Ma, and Itzhak Perlman. Alan Hohvanness, Charles Wuorinen, George Perle, and Frederic Rzewski - important composers from all points of the compass -- have all composed for him.

With Post-Classical Ensemble, in DC, Taylor two seasons ago perforemd three late Schubert songs - "Doppelganger," "Die Nebensonnen," and "Der Leiermann" -- with instrumental accompaniment, in juxtaposition with performances of the songs as Schubert wrote them, with the baritone William Sharp. Taylor sang "Nebensonnen" (in English) in a rough whisper somewhat akin to what passes for singing by Tom Waits: an audacious tour de force. But it was "Doppelganger" (under a red spotlight in a pitch-black auditorium) that most transfixed and amazed.

Next season, with Post-Classical Ensemble, Taylor will premiere his Arpeggione Concerto for bass trombone and strings - a commissioned arrangement of Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata - on a program called "Schubert Uncorked." A few weeks ago, at the Kennedy Center, he offered another "Doppelganger" with Post-Classical Ensemble, this time accompanied by six double basses. The performance was filmed -- see what you think. Here's the text (Heinrich Heine) in English translation:

Still is the night, the streets are at peace.
In this house lived my darling;
she has long since left the city,
But the house still stands in the same place.

A man stands there, gazing up,
Wringing his hands in torment;
I shudder when I see his face --
The moon shows me my own form.

You doppelganger, you pale companion!
Why do you affect the anguish of love
Which racked me in this very place,
So many a night, in times past?

Alexander Toradze, who years ago taught Vatchnadze, made an even more radical -- more muscular and eruptive -- statement in the Stravinsky Concerto for Piano and Winds, a work he has recorded with Valery Gergiev. The processional opening, beautifully shaped by Angel Gil-Ordonez, instantly attained a liturgical gravitas. The slow movement, taken more slowly than had previously seemed possible, maximized the ritualistic potential of massed winds.

Igor and Soulima left a 1930s two-piano recording of Mozart's C minor Fugue, auditioned and discussed during the Stravinsky Project. This antiseptic reading by no means cancels interpretation. Rather, it insolently downplays the music's heroic expressive content. It, too, is memorable in its way.

What to make of it all? In a program note, Toradze suggested that Stravinsky's strictures against interpretation were "something he had to do because traditional piano pedagogy teaches older styles. The prevailing traditions at the time were extremely Romantic -- rubato, singing pinkies and all of that. Stravinsky wanted more contrast, much stricter discipline, rhythmic rigor. There was no piano school that teaches you that, really. So the restrictions he placed on performers were once appropriate."
Toradze places no restrictions on interpretive liberties. In the momentary austerities of Stravinsky's bubbly Capriccio for piano and orchestra (1926-29) he infers the impact of Serge Diaghilev's death -- which occurred when the Capriccio was in its final stages of creation. At the Stravinsky Project, the film-maker Tony Palmer (whose well-known Stravinsky documentary - itself a distinguished feat of interpretation -- was screened and pondered) proposed that the chronological record doesn't really support Toradze's extrapolation. But Toradze doesn't care -- for him, the Diaghilev connection is a tool that enables him to enter more deeply in a musical world he bravely co-creates with the composer. This is a notion of the performer's role that would have been lost on Stravinsky.

At the furthest remove from Stravinsky's practice is Genadi Zagor, who closed the three-day festival with a prodigious 20-minute Stravinsky improvisation that drove the audience to its feet. The materials Zagor mainly enlisted were from The Firebird (1910). Several musicians of my acquaintance will confess, privately, that this is their favorite Stravinsky score, preceding the complex stylistic odyssey he undertook in exile from his beloved St. Petersburg.

Earlier in the same concert, Zagor and Vatchadze had offered a surging performance of the Concerto for Two Solo Pianos (1935) that Igor composed for himself and his son to play in cities where no orchestra was available. This arresting four-movement score, rarely heard today, abounds in ingenious textural effects. It incorporates an aromatic nocturne and a strenuous four-voice fugue. If it succeeds incompletely, this is partly because of cerebral aspirations exceeding musical possibilities. I would call the Concerto for Two Solo Pianos a little smug.

The Stravinsky odyssey, once a signature twentieth century achievement, has in the twenty-first century become an elusive object of singular fascination. (For more on Stravinsky, see my postings of March 23 and May 3, 9, and 26, 2010. For a Russian TV report on the Stravinsky Project, including clips of Toradze in concert, click here.)

The Harrison Piano Concerto (1985) was the centerpiece of Post-Classical Ensemble's sequence of three Harrison events over the past two weeks in DC. Why this American masterpiece is so little performed is a good question. There are a number of obvious answers, beginning with its elusive style - like so much of Harrison, it cannot be "placed." It's long (half an hour). It's majestic. The first movement is a sonata form eschewing directional harmony. The second movement is a scherzo-like "Stampede" - a tour de force for the soloist, whose part includes a wooden "octave bar" for rapidfire octave clusters on the black or white keys. The slow movement is sublime, the finale brief and ephemeral: a dissipation into the ether.

To American ears, the Harrison concerto suggests wide horizons and open space much as Copland does. And yet the Largo's hymn-like solemnity specifically evokes Brahms' D minor Piano Concerto. For Spaniards (like my friend Angel Gil-Ordonez, the Ensemble's splendid music director), the Stampede sounds Spanish: Angel discerns tablas and flamenco rhythms. North Indian and gamelan influences are unmistakable. And yet these all-over-the-map points of reference meld. The post-modern fusion of "East" and "West," today so often clumsily pursued, is here a refined product of profound cross-cultural immersion.

Harrison wrote his Piano Concerto for Keith Jarrett - in whose hands the knitted piano textures sound Jarrett-like. Ben Pasternack's reading, in DC, was revelatory. This astounding artist (is there a more commanding American pianist of his generation?) brings his characteristic gravitas and probity to bear. The gamelan textures are subtly shaded. The speaking silences are served. The virtuosity of the Stampede is effortless and complete. Pasternack also improvised a first movement cadenza.

Here is a concerto that self-evidently should be performed by our major orchestras. Audiences would be duly stimulated and impressed. Our three DC events - a film, a lecture-with-gamelan, a concert with commentary and film clips - were attended by more than 1,200 eager listeners. I say "eager" because when opportunities for interaction are seized (one-third of the Saturday night house stayed late to talk), you learn what listeners are hearing and thinking.

Chatting over brunch on Sunday, I found myself musing on the importance to performing arts organizations of obtaining "something back" from their audiences. The first step is to furnish something fresh to react to. The second is to explicitly invite a response. This initiates dialogue. It fosters community. Post-Classical Ensemble's three-day Stravinsky Project, next month, incorporates an intimate immersion experience with scheduled opportunities to mingle with the participating pianists and scholars.

Concurrent with our Harrison events, the National Symphony presented a subscription program, on the Kennedy Center's ongoing "Indian" festival, comprising music by Roussel and the Indian tabla virtuoso Zakkir Hussain. Two of three concerts sold out.

Orchestras are in trouble today. Forced to change, they face polar options: retrenchment or innovation. This past week in DC, innovation proved a winning ticket for all.

In Pittsburgh, Manfred Honeck delivered Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony as a profession of faith in God and mankind (see my blog of Feb. 13). Never before had I heard this work's problematic finale so infused with liturgical resonance, so distant from trumpets and drums.

Last weekend, Carl St. Clair - like Honeck, a devout Roman Catholic - led his Pacific Symphony in performances of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony buoyed by a gripping religious narrative of trial and redemption. For St. Clair, the pounding Scherzo of this final Bruckner opus signifies a crucible of carnal temptation which the dying composer must endure. The Adagio's three cataclysms signify for him a further rite of passage recalling the agonies of Christ. The coda's beatitude, I am now convinced, is a leavetaking literally envisioned; the apocalyptic visions sited, the radiant halo of divinity towards which the humble believer ascends and into which he is absorbed -- it's all there.

St. Clair's Bruckner is more remote from Mahler than any Bruckner I have ever encountered. (OK - I make an exception for Eugen Jochum's mesmerizing Bruckner 8, which I was fortunate to hear at Carnegie Hall late in that conductor's career.) Mahler is always aware of multiple worlds, multiple layers and possibilities - he is a chronic ironist triumphantly in quest of the divine. Bruckner is ever whole; essentially, he sees and hears one thing. I marvel that there are conductors - Klemperer and Tennstedt are the two who most speak to me - who equally serve both these autobiographical symphonists. Think of the exceptions: Jochum, Furtwangler, Celibidache were not Mahlerites. Mengelberg and Bernstein were not known for their Bruckner.

Friday night, I sat in the choir terrace of the Pacific Symphony's superb Segerstrom Concert Hall - which means I could watch the anguish and exaltation etched in St. Clair's weathered features. Self-evidently, he has at 58 acquired life experiences enough to earnestly inhabit this work (which he had resisted conducting before now). It was overwhelmingly impressive. I mean this literally: at two of the symphony's three performances, an audience member in the choir loft collapsed and required medical attention during the death throes of the Adagio. On Saturday, the orchestra had to stop while resuscitation was administered. Incredibly the music resumed with intensified gravitas.

St. Clair's Bruckner 9 performances were part of the orchestra's "Music Unwound" series, supported by a $500,000 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant. All Music Unwound performances include production elements not normally associated with evenings at the symphony. Last season's Music Unwound presentations of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony incorporated a visual track by my colleague Peter Bogdanoff and a superb stage actor (Nick Ullett) as Tchaikovsky. Our goal was to facilitate intense personal engagement. (Cf. my blog of Feb. 8, 2010.)

For Bruckner's Ninth, St. Clair secured a cathedral ambience with the participation of a lighting designer, the organist Paul Jacobs, and the chanted processionals of the Norbertine Fathers of St. Michael's Abbey. Jacobs contributed a singular reading of Bach's St Anne Fugue, as potent as it was original. It was St. Clair's inspired notion to share excepts from the symphony on the organ before intermission - the pertinence of the organ to Bruckner's sonic tapestries was clinched; the impact of the orchestra was reserved for the actual performance.

Next season's Pacific Symphony Music Unwound productions include Mahler's Ninth Symphony, which St. Clair has programmed in sequence with the Tchaikovsky and Bruckner symphonies as the third in a trilogy of "Departures," recording final thoughts.

I hope that the Mellon imprimatur will help St. Clair and his orchestra to acquire the national influence and recognition both have long deserved. To my knowledge, no other American orchestra pushes the envelope harder.

I really didn't know what to expect, re-encountering Nixon at the Metropolitan Opera this season. Incredibly, 23 years have passed. That's an easy calculation: Bernie is now 23 years old. How had Nixon aged? Would its style and subject matter seem ephemeral? How would it suit the venerable Met, where it had never before been mounted?

The production, by Peter Sellars, was mainly the same one I saw in Brooklyn. Mark Morris was again the choreographer. James Maddalena was again an indelible Nixon. The landing of the President's "Spirit of '76" was not a surprise Sellars coup, as in 1987, but expectation and renewed memory conjoined to tingle the spine. I discovered that I still adore Pat's second act aria, and Morris's sly version of "The Red Detachment of Women."

But I wasn't prepared for the impact of the opera's short final act, in which the Nixons, Mao, and Chou En-Lai, taking stock of newly historic events, re-inhabit their respective journeys through life. This unexpected elegiac close -- in which the Met orchestra surpassed itself in the demanding solo ascents of the opera's serene final measures -- now attains for me a beautifully calibrated gravitas. It attains closure.

As at Adams' Dr. Atomic last season, Nixon brought to the Met an exceptionally serious audience. There was no coughing. The ovations that greeted the composer (who also conducted) expressed appreciation, gratitude, and pride. And Adams, I thought, exuded those same sentiments when he took his last bows.

I left the house secure in the knowledge that Nixon in China had aged gracefully - and that I, gracefully or not, had aged with it.

Kudos to Peter Gelb and the Met for keeping the faith.