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Arts & Entertainment Preview - February 1999 B Y   A U S T I N   B A E R Overnight Sensation     Bejun Mehta "I never liked countertenors very much," says Bejun Mehta, whose brilliant eight-year career as a boy soprano ended in 1983. "I never wanted to be one." But on November 4, 1997, when he read a profile of the much-admired countertenor David Daniels, the story felt oddly familiar. Like Mehta, Daniels had sung as long as he could remember. Like Mehta, he had struggled to remake himself in an accepted "grownup" vocal category. Only when he took flight as a countertenor did his primal connection to music suddenly return. "I put down the magazine," Mehta says, "got up out of my chair, took a breath, and made sound." Months later he was singing Handel in downtown Man- hattan, a newborn countertenor blowing listeners away with his fluency, power, and emotional abandon. Performances of Handel's Partenope at the New York City Opera this fall brought the news uptown. A European tour has taken him to London and Vienna, where he celebrated his first anniversary as a countertenor. "We're on an arc of legitimization," he says. "When countertenors first came along, they got jobs if they had the notes, and the notes didn't even have to be pretty. Then people started demanding style, range, dynamic control, depth -- all the things they demanded of 'normal' singers for years. I already know what the next phase will be. There are kids now who want to be countertenors and never wanted to be anything else. For them, it's not an exotic thing." Unlike their elders, whose repertoire was an either/or of baroque and the avant-garde, state-of-the-art countertenors range freely. In recital under the aegis of the Marilyn Horne Foundation at the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York City on February 7, Mehta offers Barber and Brahms (212-734-2130). Picture-Perfect Lowell Liebermann Nearly three years ago a glittering crowd in Monte Carlo cheered the world premiere of a new American opera: Lowell Liebermann's The Picture of Dorian Gray, after Oscar Wilde's classic chiller. The music combines rich, unabashed emotion with an energy that at times recalls the minimalists. Dorian -- the "golden boy" who never ages -- is a tenor, of course, and Sybil Vane, the actress whose heart he breaks, is a high soprano. By convention, one might expect Dorian's diabolical corrupter to sing bass. In a remarkably imaginative touch, Liebermann cast him instead as a suave baritone, reserving the lower range for the innocent painter of Dorian's portrait, that mutable reflection of a disintegrating soul. Acting as his own librettist, the composer pared Wilde's prose down to lines that are literate yet eminently singable; as in a good musical, the words come across. Shot through with expressive melody, brilliantly orchestrated, paced with unerring dramatic flair, the score is all that Andrew Lloyd Webber's turgid Phantom of the Opera ought to be: something less than a milestone in the history of the medium, perhaps, but a first-class popular entertainment crafted with passion and art. It is no stretch to imagine Dorian Gray on Broadway. In fact, its next stop is the Florentine Opera Company, in Milwaukee, where it receives its U.S. premiere (February 3-5; 414-273-7206). Master of the House The New York Philharmonic feels proprietary about Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), with just cause. More esteemed in his own time as a conductor than as a composer, the great late Romantic spent the last seasons of his short life on the podium of the New World's oldest orchestra. There he led (among much else) the U.S. premiere of his First Symphony and the New York premiere of his Fourth, but many decades passed before his music gained general acceptance. The New York Philharmonic If today the public takes Mahler's eminence for granted, the credit should go to wave after wave of crusaders such as Leopold Stokowski, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta, and (most determined of them all) Leonard Bernstein, who struck some of their most splendid blows for Mahler at the New York Philharmonic. Next month the tradition continues when Daniele Gatti, a young Mahlerite of major promise, takes up the idyllic Symphony No. 4, which builds to a disarming vision of heaven as seen by a child (March 4, 5, 6, 9; 212-721-6500). To appreciate how high the bar is, listen to the Philharmonic's authoritative new twelve-CD box The Mahler Broadcasts, 1948-1982, featuring landmark performances of all the symphonies and major song cycles, plus a generous helping of oral history. Within the line-up of illustrious maestros, the name one looks for in vain is Leonard Bernstein, to whose tapes rights unforgivably proved unobtainable. (The Mahler Broadcasts may be ordered at 1-800-557-8268.) Austin Baer is a writer based in New York. Go to ... Copyright © 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.