Los Angeles. (North America).(Moses und Aron, The Merry Widow)

For all its reputed stronghold on Tomorrowland's cutting edge, Los Angeles maintains a tidy scrapbook of its remarkable, unlikely past. Lately, for example, its musical establishment has enjoyed a fine nostalgic wallow in memories of the days when giants walked its earth -- when Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, the last century's pivotal musical innovators, shared a small parcel of high-rental turf while feigning oblivion of each other's presence. Last season was Stravinsky's turn, with a festival of his works familiar and not-so, sparked by the Los Angeles Philharmonic but nicely buttressed by other local musical institutions, that to everyone's surprise drew a month's worth of cheering, sold-out houses. This season the spotlight has fallen on Schoenberg, again with a turnout far beyond expectations.

Again the Philharmonic, under its immensely popular leader, Esa-Pekka Salonen, provides the main impetus for a Schoenberg observance that extends throughout the season. Even so, the bravest and most challenging element in the season came from a far less likely source, Los Angeles Opera, which offered up the craggiest of all Schoenberg scores, the unfinished opera Moses und Aron, which it produced for one night only (December 9) in a concert performance brought over from Berlin.

This was billed as the first hearing of this music in Los Angeles, or anywhere else on the West Coast. Schoenberg arrived in Los Angeles in 1933, with the unfinished opera -- two of the proposed three acts -- in his luggage. In the ensuing eighteen years he struggled in vain to find time and funding to complete the work; a begging letter to the Guggenheim Foundation, widely reprinted, makes sad reading -- alongside the $37-a-month pension granted Schoenberg on his retirement from UCLA.

So much for the past; Los Angeles's first-ever Moses und Aron also revealed the vista of a happier future. Kent Nagano, Los Angeles Opera's new principal conductor, toiled under his other hat, leading his Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, ...