Bartok

Salonen conducts Lindberg and Bartok Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 South Grand Ave., Los Angeles When: Saturday 8 p.m., Sunday 2 p.m. Admission: Tickets from $56 to $177 Contact: http://www.laphil.com , (323) 850-2000

Mira Bartok's memoir of her schizophrenic, homeless mother, Norma, is relentlessly sad. Unlike memoirs like "Angela's Ashes" or "The Liar's Club," there is very little triumph over tragedy in the author's life; no forgiveness, no "closure. " There is only this beautifully constructed, richly detailed book. "The Memory Palace" is a creative act that required pure courage and the transformative powers of an artist. Bartok brings a painterly eye to her memories; colorful birds, paintings that mother and daughter both loved, objects in her grandmother's house that were invested with hope or despair.

I don't know that Baudelaire meant music in his poem "Invitation to the Voyage," when he thought of a world far away -- exotic, unobtainable, a land lost in love's gaze. "All is order there, and elegance," he wrote, "pleasure, peace and opulence." But I think he did. Music as an outpost of order, pleasure, peace and opulence kept Bartok and Stravinsky sane when their world was not. In 1936, with the Nazi takeover of Hungary inevitable, Bartok turned to fugues and the mathematical Fibonacci series for "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta," one of his most magical scores.

Salonen conducts Lindberg and Bartok Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 South Grand Ave., Los Angeles When: Saturday 8 p.m., Sunday 2 p.m. Admission: Tickets from $56 to $177 Contact: http://www.laphil.com , (323) 850-2000

Though these four 20th century composers are separated by country, style, temperament and you-name-it, Ohlsson assembles a coherent, unified program from their solo piano catalogs. He takes a relatively soft-focused view of the dramatic wartime Prokofiev sonata, and the crystalline Webern radiates a gentler glow in his hands than in those of, say, Maurizio Pollini or Glenn Gould. Yet in Bartok's mostly vehement Three Studies--a relatively rare item--Ohlsson generates all the forward drive one would want.

If Elvis, Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder have been recognized as musical geniuses, what does that make, say, Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington (Calendar Letters, Aug. 7)? How abut Mozart, Bartok and Monteverdi? DAVID RESKIN Hollywood

Re "Kubrick Confronted Holocaust--Indirectly," Commentary, March 12: The absurdity of the current academic fad of deconstructionism is exposed in Geoffrey Cocks' homage to Stanley Kubrick, in which Cocks maintains that Bela Bartok's "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste" (composed in 1936, not 1937) was written as a protest to Nazism. If Cocks has proof, he is sitting on a musicological discovery of major importance. It is so very easy to ascribe anti-Nazi sentiments to virtually anything composed by a refugee, if indeed Bartok was one, during those horrible years.

In his account of the Independent Composers Assn. concert of Hungarian electronic music (Music Reviews, Oct. 28), Gregg Wager writes: " Ludi Spaziali,' for tape and piano, synchronizes a wash of electronically altered piano sounds with the playing of an onstage pianist who looks like a curious caricature of Bartok." Said pianist, being myself, utterly fails to see the likeness. I dare say Philip of Spain and I bear closer resemblance than Bartok and I. In fact, it's OK with me if Wager thinks I look like Bartok.

The three B's of classical music--Bach, Beethoven and Brahms--is what the new sound of KFAC is delivering, exactly what we, the legion of new listeners, prefer. The few old-time listeners who preferred the old format with Bartok, Britton, Brubeck and the bellowing broads of Carl Princi opera got only a lot of noise and very low ratings. Bravo KFAC! C. J. WEINSCHREIDER Mission Viejo

In "As Symphonies Set in the East ..." (Dec. 9), Mark Swed revealed to his unsuspecting readers several amazing truths. He started by explaining to the ignorant masses that all the so-called Big Five orchestras are dumb and old-fashioned while two California ones are doing just about everything right. Sounds too simplistic? Hey, never mind, where is your stately pride?! He further enlightened us by proclaiming that music written by mere mediocrities such as Richard Strauss and Bela Bartok (ever heard of those two?

I don't know that Baudelaire meant music in his poem "Invitation to the Voyage," when he thought of a world far away -- exotic, unobtainable, a land lost in love's gaze. "All is order there, and elegance," he wrote, "pleasure, peace and opulence." But I think he did. Music as an outpost of order, pleasure, peace and opulence kept Bartok and Stravinsky sane when their world was not. In 1936, with the Nazi takeover of Hungary inevitable, Bartok turned to fugues and the mathematical Fibonacci series for "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta," one of his most magical scores.

Hungarian mezzo-soprano Klara Palankay, 85, acclaimed for her role as Judith in Bela Bartok's opera "Bluebeard's Castle," died Wednesday in a Budapest hospital where she was being treated for a cold, said Hungarian State Opera press officer Judit Varkonyi. The cause of death was not immediately known. Palankay studied at Budapest's Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music and later in Rome between 1938 and 1944, the year she began her career at the Hungarian State Opera.

Pianist Gyorgy Sandor, who was a protege of Hungarian composer Bela Bartok and toured the world into his 90s while teaching at the Juilliard School, has died. He was 93. Sandor died Friday of heart failure at his home in New York City, according to his son Michael. A native of Budapest, Hungary, Sandor studied piano with Bartok and composition with Zoltan Kodaly at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music.

The fabled Cleveland Orchestra -- king of American orchestras -- has finally returned to Southern California after a 14-year absence and for the first time under Franz Welser-Most, who became its music director in 2002. The Orange County Performing Arts Center got it first, in a Dvorak/Bartok program Wednesday night before the orchestra moved on to Walt Disney Concert Hall on Thursday night and then northward for the Ojai Music Festival this weekend.

One of the best ways to get to know a composer's works is to hear them in sequence. That's what the Penderecki String Quartet is enabling us to do with a survey of Bela Bartok's six string quartets at the L.A. County Museum of Art's Leo S. Bing Theater. Monday, violinists Jeremy Bell and Jerzy Kaplanek, violist Christine Vlajk and cellist Simon Fryer began with Quartets 1 and 2. Tonight they will play 3 and 4; and next Monday, the final two.

With "All Fours," his newest large-scale group piece, modern dance choreographer Mark Morris has made the improbable possible. He's created a dance to a Bartok string quartet -- which may be a first for anyone -- and he's also made this thorny, intricate music more legible. That's what people mean when they talk about Morris' musicality.

Antoinette Perry brought exceptional artistry as percussionist to her Tuesday night recital in the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at USC. Acknowledging pianist Perry thus merely underscores the perspective of her challenging program. In music of Schoenberg, Bartok, Shostakovich, George Crumb and Donald Keats, Perry exploited those possibilities of the piano that graphically emphasize its historic assignation to the percussion family of instruments. And she did so with the same intense care and respect that she has brought to Mozart and Beethoven.

Over the years, we have come to expect much of the Kronos Quartet. Seldom, however, is a concert of contemporary music so unreservedly rewarding--in repertory as in performance--as that offered by the Kronos Saturday evening at Schoenberg Hall, UCLA. The generous, tightly constructed program included new and old works.

Bartok composed his Concerto for Orchestra in 1943 as a dying man in the United States. It doesn't tell a story, but it's generally regarded as a longing look at his homeland, Hungary. It shifts from heaviness in the first movement to life assertion in the last. The Hungarians have taken it to heart. In the hands of conductor Zoltan Kocsis and the Hungarian National Philharmonic, Friday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, it became a national epic.

Los Angeles Opera closes its 2001-02 season with a rarity of a double bill: two acknowledged masterpieces from the 20th century, Bela Bartok's "Duke Bluebeard's Castle" and Puccini's "Gianni Schicchi." Bartok's single opera and Puccini's single comedy, both first produced in 1918, are different stage animals but are complementary. The former is mysterious, allusive, symbolic and ambiguous; the latter, accessible, beautifully crafted and easy to love.