UMBRELLA

Ernst Krenek turned 90 last summer.He lives in Palm Springs, where he continues
to compose. His opus numbers are, in fact, well into the high 200s. At Monday
night’s Green Umbrella concert at the Japan America Theater, the sweep across
Krenek’s music ran from Opus 58, of 1928, to 234, of 1981.
Krenek has spent more than half his life as a self-willed exile from central
Europe, where the quotient of “degeneracy” in his music was recognized as
early as 1927. In that year he wrote his jazz-tinged opera “Jonny spielt
auf,” which brought down on his head epithets both racial and religious. The
logo for the current “Degenerate Music” exhibition which opens this week at
the Music Center is the Nazis’ perversion of the figure of Jonny himself from
that opera, taken from an old poster.
Monday’s concert, well-attended as all the Philharmonic’s new-music series have
been this season, offered a fascinating look into a composer who, in his many
years, has composed many kinds of music. The latest work, a set of tiny
orchestral movements called “Arc of Life” possessed, among its other charms,
an unshakable sense of nostalgia.
Krenek had never been part of Arnold Schoenberg’s circle of atonal
practitioners, yet his own career seemed to reflect the work of these
compatriots. Schoenberg, Berg and Webern had all composed sets of small
orchestral pieces, aphoristic little wisps of sound, encompassing strongly
defined sentiments in very few measures. And here was Krenek, decades later,
doing the same sort of thing in the 12 movements — none more than 90 seconds
long — of this captivating little suite.
That work came, chronologically speaking, at the near end of the survey. At the
far end was the “Little Symphony” (“little,” however, neither in length nor
scoring), bristling and sarcastic, attached this time not to the Schoenberg
ideal but to the dry-point nose-thumbing works of Kurt Weill and Paul
Hindemith. If the effect was a little like being trapped in an elevator with a
man who knows only one joke, the joke at least had its moments.
In between, in this exceptionally engrossing concert, were two vocal works, the
exquisite song-cycle “Through the Night” (in its third local performance
within the past month and still sounding like some unknown piece of Schubert,
updated but still radiant) and the dramatic monologue “The Dissembler.” This
last seemed the most dated of all, the composer’s own text (so much Freud, so
much strained comic pastiche) half-sung half-yelled by the admirable Hector
Vasquez, immersed in a musical setting that seemed more sound effect than
musical counterpart. Any composer who racks up over 200 opus numbers is
entitled to nod now and then.
Performances were top-grade throughout. David Alan Miller, who led the
Philharmonic New Music Group in three of the four items, continues to grow in
insight and technical mastery with every appearance. Donald Crockett’s
Contemporary Music Ensemble from USC did its customary fine job with “Through
the Night,” with Anne Marie Ketchum’s expert handling of the fragrant,
evocative text. The composer, too frail to attend, would have been proud.