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Arts & Entertainment Preview - April 1998 B Y   A U S T I N   B A E R Can it Be? New World Baroque Chanticleer From the Eurocentric point of view, colonial culture smacks of the provincial: if not derivative (because remote from the source), it must be quaint (because cross-bred with naive local tradition). Today snobbish imperialist attitudes are under steady fire. Ours is a golden age of rediscovery in the arts, and few icons glitter more brightly than an unjustly neglected native genius. Two of the latest candidates are composers of "New Spain": the Italian-born Ignacio de Jerúsalem (ca. 1710-1769), and Manuel de Zumaya (ca. 1678-1755), of mixed Native American and European descent. Though their names are not unknown to the authoritative New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), few outside a narrow subspecialty had ever encountered them until the appearance of the CD Mexican Baroque (Das Alte Werk/Teldec), performed by San Francisco's twelve-member all-male vocal ensemble Chanticleer. The reviewer for England's influential Gramophone magazine, for one, considered this a "very exciting disc indeed." How distinctive the composers' voices are -- and how "Mexican" -- remains a matter of debate. Jerúsalem suggests Mozart in an elegantly churchly mood calculated to please. Zumaya is wild yet learned, delighting in spiky counterpoint. Having released Mexican Baroque II in February, Chanticleer now embarks on a concert tour to spread the long-forgotten masters' fame from California, Texas, and Colorado back home to Mexico, where cathedrals in Mexico City, Morelia, Oaxaca, and Guadalahara will resound to the indigenous baroque scores for the first time in centuries. (April 27-May 20; for the full tour schedule, look up Chanticleer at www.atlantic-records.com or phone 800-950-1177.) Made to Last There are more recondite things to say about the music of Lou Harrison (born 1917), but the simple truth is that it's lovely to listen to. His hallmark is melody -- "the audience's take-home pay," he has called it. One floats down his scores as if rafting broad, balmy streams spangled with sunlight, ajangle with sensuous, not-quite-human song. Harrison's life and travels -- someday to be told at length in an interminably delayed biography from the Oxford University Press -- should make colorful reading. Getting by variously as a florist, a dancer, a critic, a veterinarian's assistant, a music copyist, a professor, and heaven knows what else, Harrison crossed paths with a motley crew of teachers, mentors, and colleagues, from the fanatically systematic Arnold Schoenberg to the chance-happy John Cage. Ethnic music (of the Americas, of the Far East) has always fascinated him. In search of new timbres, he has scoured inner-city junkyards and circled the globe. His Symphony No. 4 (subtitled "Last Symphony") makes a radiant summation of a bewitching, utterly personal style that over the decades has kept remarkably true to itself. The piece runs forty-odd minutes, concluding with three Native American tales of the coyote, narrated in a disarming singsong. Since 1990 Harrison's Fourth has seen some fine-tuning, and this month the National Symphony Orchestra gives the East Coast premiere of the now definitive version at the Kennedy Center (April 23-25; 202-467-4600). Home listeners can hear it now on the superb CD Lou Harrison: A Portrait (Argo), featuring the California Symphony under its industrious founder and music director, Barry Jekowsky, who navigates Harrison's currents perfectly; in the coyote tales Al Jarreau is the hip, graceful vocalist. Happily, both are on hand in the capital. As the Saying Goes, "All is in Order" Recognized as a grand master of the violin for more than two decades, Anne-Sophie Mutter, now thirty-four, is of course an old hand at the Beethoven violin sonatas. This season, for the first time, she tackles all ten in chronological order. Along with the pianist Lambert Orkis, she traverses the set in three-concert series at Carnegie Hall (April 14, 22, 30; 212-247-7800), Chicago's Orchestra Hall (April 19, 26, 29; 312-294-3000), and San Francisco's Davies Hall (May 3 and 4; 415-864-6000). One-evening programs of selected Beethoven sonatas are offered in Dallas, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, and Los Angeles). The performances are part of an eleven-month world tour exclusively devoted to this repertoire, recorded live by Deutsche Grammophon. Preparations for the marathon took Mutter to the archives in the house of Beethoven's birth, in Bonn. "The paper of the manuscripts is almost transparent in places -- Beethoven corrected and scratched through so much," she said on a recent swing through New York after a vacation with her children in the Rockies. "Seeing the handwriting completes the picture you have from the printed scores. It shows the conflict in his character." Playing the ten violin sonatas as a group, she has discovered, throws new light on the material as well. "Beethoven needed contrast. I used to feel that No. 5, the `Spring Sonata,' was too innocent, too harmless. It's not when you see it in the context of No. 4, which is so dark. It's like at Yellowstone: a cold day makes you long for sunshine." Austin Baer is a writer based in New York. Go to ... Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.