She stood at the edge of the stage, but when the Davies Hall audience first
heard Lauren Flanagan tonight, the sound came from among the brass, about
30 feet upstage.  It was a sound - animal, otherwordly - becoming speech
and then song and then music soaring with and above the enormous orchestra.

In a performance of Luciano Berio's "Epiphanies," which first evoked the
glorious memory of Cathy Berberian creating the role (in 1993, but going
back 40 years with the work's genesis in "Epifanie"), Flanagan built to
a plateau of almost unbearable intensity that left the soprano so spent
that she struggled to stand up to acknowledge the applause, and gave the
audience the experience of a new standard against which to measure all
future performances.

In French, English, Italian and German, Flanagan spoke, declaimed and
sang, communicating with equal power and effectiveness.  She created a
hush with Proust's meditation on what trees conceal, startled with her
sudden outburst of "There is God!" (from Joyce's "Ulysses") and overwhelmed
with the quiet pain in Brecht's text:  "Such times as these - when a
conversation about trees is almost a crime because it implies silence
about so many horrible deeds."

With Michael Tilson Thomas on the podium, the San Francisco Symphony
played those complex sound clusters, outbursts of chaos, waves of
fragmented, incomplete romantic beauty in a peak form, on par with its
recent outstanding performances of Mahler and Stravinsky.  Flanagan, MTT
and the Wagner-size orchestra (playing in chamber-music groups most of
the time) united in a performance, which revealed this large, difficult,
magnificent work to an audience consisting of newcomers to Berio's music,
those with a clear understanding of it, and - the large majority, including
this writer - those in-between.

There were surprisingly few defections during "Epiphanies" - perhaps six
people from an audience of about 1,500 - but then those who ventured out on
this rain-swept evening knew, roughly, what's in store.  The concert is the
first in a series of "Italian Mavericks" presentations, to be followed by
"Pan-American Mavericks."

The concert (to be repeated through Saturday) opened with a very old
maverick, Claudio Monteverdi.  His 1610 "Sonata sopra `Sancta Maria',"
from "Vespers for the Blessed Virgin," is both an ancient, last masterpiece
and a "modern" work with elements of Music-to-Come, from Bach to Brahms to
Stravinsky.  MTT repeatedly emphasized Stravinsky's interest in both the
composer and this particular piece.

The music director also spoke of asking Berio what would be a proper
"maverick" piece in-between "Vespers" and "Ephipanies," a reported the
composer's reply as follows:  "Anyone with talent between the 17th and
20th centuries did not write music.  They wrote opera." There is no ready
response to a statement like that, and MTT just let in hang there.

Two among my unfavorite composers took up the second half:  Giacinto Scelsi
("I presagi") and Ottorino Respighi ("Roman Festivals").  Scelsi, an MTT
favorite, has some similarity on the surface with Berio, but there is this
essential difference:  even when you don't "understand Berio, you sense
that there is something there; even when you get Scelsi, the there ain't
there.  How did Respighi get into this program? "Not a rampant modernist,"
the Symphony program admits, "but to the extent that a maverick can refer
to someone who marches to his own drummer, Respighi surely qualifies." I am
just no fond of such solo percussion, however loud - and, of course,
Respighi always is.

Among previous MTT maverick series, last year's "American Mavericks" was a
landmark music event.  The good news, on the day of the opening of "Italian
Mavericks" is that the University of California Press is publishing a
substantial volume of essays about and music from that festival.

The CD that comes with "American Mavericks:  Visionaries, Pioneers,
Iconoclasts" represents a small portion of the extensive, ambitious
program of the festival.  It has MTT's lectures about and, in some cases
(mostly among the living) interviews with, the composers:  Charles Ives
(Quarter-tone Piano Piece No.  2), Henry Cowell (Piano Concerto), George
Antheil ("Ballet mecanique"), Lou Harrison (Organ Concerto), John Cage
("Credo in Us"), Morton Feldman (Piece for 4 Pianos), Lukas Foss, John
Adams, David del Tredici ("Adventures Underground"), Meredith Monk, Steve
Mackey ("Tuck & Roll").

All this on the day the Financial Times proclaimed "the strange death of
the avant-garde" on the American opera scene in the quarter century since
"Einstein on the Beach." I can see MTT's festival next year:  "US Opera
Mavericks." Don't worry - he'll find 'em.

Janos Gereben/SF
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