The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 35

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2015 E13 LATIMES.COMCALENDAR THE ARTS MUSIC REVIEW Works are better late than ever Andras Schiff focuses on final sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. MARK SWED os Angeles (Times HHPPT, 'WKBSbitESSBKSKk jzMBBll.M BH SANTA BARBARA When the American composer Elliott Carter reached the seemingly ripe old age of 80, 1 interviewed him about his late style. He wasn't much interested in either looking back or keeping an appointment with death. His wish was to find fresh ways to stay interested. Carter told me the same thing on his 100th birthday.

He died in 2012 a month shy of 104, and in the nearly 24 years since his supposed onset of lateness Carter wrote dozens of works, large and small, reinventing himself time and again. So much for late style. Andras Schiff played the last piano sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert on Wednesday night in Santa Barbara's intimate Lobero Theatre, a program he will repeat Sunday at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Schiff is a magnificent pianist, and these performances were profoundly illuminating. There wasn't a moment in the intense recital not made to mesmerizing-ly matter.

Schiff has been probing the idea of lateness all year, this program being the culmination of his examinations of the last three sonatas of the three composers who defined the Classical style and the outlier Schubert, who might have been the principal forger of Romanticism had he not died in 1828 at age 31, a year after Beethoven (27 years his senior). These last sonatas are no more and no less than last thoughts on sonatas. Each represents something different musically and in the life of the composer. Haydn wrote his buoyant 62nd Sonata when he was 62 (Schiff 's age), and then spent his last 15 years busy with other projects, such as major oratorios. Mozart was 33 when he wrote his Sonata No.

18, a simple piece on the surface but deliciously seditious on the inside two years before his death. Beethoven's famously prophetic Sonata No. 32, Opus 111, raged and summoned angels to a degree that no piano music had ever before attempted. But al- Lawrence K. Ho Los Angeles Times ANDRAS SCHIFF illuminates four composers' last piano sonatas at Lobero Theatre.

He performs at Disney Hall in L.A. on Sunday. Schiff is also a sly pianist. Mozart's sonata is full of commonplace devices. The composer was presumably writing for an amateur royal.

But Mozart could not stop himself with subtle musical turns of phrase, with unexpected harmonies. The way Schiff savored inner voices in the slow movement was almost political in its subtle subversion. To my mind Schiff is the finest Hungarian pianist since Bartok, and outdoes even Bartok in his rhythmic acuity and staggering color palate. The power of Schiff 's performance of Beethoven's Opus 111 was as percussive revolution. The sonata's last movement begins as a set of variations on a bewitching arietta but gradually goes out of any expected structural, harmonic, tonal or melodic bounds.

Beethoven skips centuries with a vast ringing of trills to which Schiff gave such a metallic sheen that they seemed equivalent to something a French Spectralist composer could only produce with the help of a computer. Schiff 's Schubert was, on this occasion, also unusually metallic. That may have something to do with the pianist's exploration of the early 18th century forte-pianos (he's just recorded the last two Schubert sonatas on an instrument from Schubert's day) But Schiff is, at heart, a modern pianist, and Wednesday's slower performance than on the new recording was both sharply defined and gorgeous. Schubert decorates the slow movement with exquisite tinkling high notes that usually are made to serve as the musical equivalent of illuminating a scene with magical starlight. Schiff underplayed the glitter and, in Serious concerns under comic banter stead, created a counterpoint of something barely detected but utterly necessary.

The effect was to make us aware of the background of life, perhaps the motion of atoms or the electrical current of our nervous system. It wasn't magic, but real. Are these late thoughts? If so, what Schiff offers is not so much what the composers meant but where our thoughts lead when we listen to them, an activity that, at its most productive, has the potential to guide an audience toward the same wavelength. When a hearing aid beeped just as Schiff was about to play a Bach encore, it almost sounded like something Schiff's Schubert might have set off, and he smiled and said it was in the right key. mark.swedlatimes.com 'Guards at the Taj' Where: Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater at the Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Los Angeles When: 8 p.m.

Tuesdays-Fridays, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Nov. 15.

Tickets: Info: (310) 208-5454, www.geffenplayhouse.com Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes was the son of Babur, whose reign over his newly conquered kingdom was shortlived). "Guards at the Taj" had its world premiere earlier this year off-Broadway courtesy of the Atlantic Theatre Company. But there's nothing secondary about the Geffen production. The acting is rich, varied and tinged with a sweetness that allows us to better tolerate some of the more shocking occurrences. Barsoumian shades Hu-mayun's regimented nature with just enough doubt and regret.

Monsef doesn't overplay the cleverness inspiring Babur's innocent enthusiasms but it is clear whose imagination has more depth. Together these performers find the heart that makes "Guards at the Taj" not merely audacious but touchingly so. charles.mcnulty latimes.com pected accents or dark trills that were like mysterious signs. There is little indication of a Schubert ready for death. Schiff has impeccable technique.

He demonstrates a degree of concentration that is almost frighteningly intense. He does not attempt to pretend spontaneity. Instead he presents his listeners with a fully considered interpretation. But conveying an acute sense of being makes Schiff 's playing great. That means taking himself and the music seriously without always being serious.

In Haydn, Schiff, who has a reputation for having a shocking sense of humor, knows how to tell a joke. He knows the difference between deep emotion and playfulness, and the last movements of Haydn's, Mozart's and Schubert's sonatas were joyous. left, and Ramiz Monsef engage characters, the aching tenderness lurking within the mutual exasperation, is what draws us into Joseph's story. This is a relatively small piece the theatrical scope isn't as breathtaking as "Bengal Tiger" but it is uniquely engineered. Most Andras Schiff Where Walt Disney Concert Hall, downtown Los Angeles When: 7:30 p.m.

Sunday Cost: Info: (323) 850-2000, www.laphil.org though Beethoven was through with piano sonatas, taking the genre as far it could conceivably (at the time) go, he moved on to other forms of visionary piano writing. Schubert, on the other hand, was in the last stages of syphilis when he finished his heavenly Sonata No. 21. But were these fatalistic last thoughts of a young man? Schiff 's insightful performance had the feature of eloquently chaste lyricism disrupted by potently unex RAFFI BARSOUMIAN, have to fear is tigers and snakes rather than a crazy despot and where a gargantuan flock of colorful birds can reveal to them a natural wonder as sublime as anything man-made. As with Beckett's work, the interdependence of the from El clowning to the macabre farce of Martin McDonagh (author of "The Pillowman," "A Behanding in Spokane" and other carnage-filled comedies) is smoothly pulled off.

The blood-soaked stage consequence of an emperor who doesn't like his authority second-guessed doesn't stop the laughter, though the humor shifts into a gallows mode. The banter (playfully writtenintoday'sidiom) and shameless pratfalls can make Joseph's play seem like a sketch comedy. But serious concerns underlie the insouciant high jinks. Questions of tyranny and freedom, the correctness of following brutal leadership and the place of beauty in our lives are explicitly taken up by the characters. This thematic material might at moments be a little too spelled out.

But the most interesting meditation in the play, on the opposition between culture and nature, is delicately handled, thoughts on the subject arising in an appealing half-light. Those noisy birds from the opening scene, it turns out, aren't simply a diversion planted by the playwright to get his characters talking. The Taj Mahal, an architectural expression of the desire to out-nature nature in its capacity for majestic creation, was built to never be surpassed. But human ambition of this order comes at a punishing price, one that will have Babur and Huma-yun dreaming of escape into the jungle, where all they will Michael Lamont "Guards at the Taj" scene. stunning set by Tom Buder-witz that visually keeps pace with the play's abrupt turns, never lets us lose sight of what connects Humayun and Babur, whose historical names suggest a familial relationship.

(Humayun, the second Mughal emperor, in forbidden chatter in a impressive of all perhaps is Joseph's ability to balance the increasingly creepy slapstick with the hand-clasping humanity of two characters who, like it or not, are as bonded as brothers. The production, directed by Giovanna Sardelli on a.