UMBRELLA

If these Green Umbrella concerts keep getting better, they’re in danger, one of
these Monday nights, of taking off into orbit. Once again, Monday night at the
Japan-America Theater, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new-music series struck
gold: a triumph both of programming and performance.
Oliver Knussen conducted with great skill and inmsight, his second appearance
this season. The only thing wrong about that is the unseemly modesty that keeps
him from programming any of his own excellent music. On his home turf, this
burly Britisher is highly regarded as a composer, and also as a brilliant
interpreter of other people’s new scores. Lucky Los Angeles, that he has chosen
this as his major American base.
Four works — two American and two British — constituted the program, with the
best music placed at beginning and end. Morton Feldman’s “For Frank O’Hara,”
which began proceedings, is one of that late composer’s characteristic
exercises in sounds mostly at the edge of silence. Written for seven
instruments — flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and two percussionists —
and relatively brief (15 minutes or thereabouts) as Feldman pieces go, the
music generates a spell both firm and gentle. A plink here, a plunk there, a
silence in between: the sense of unfolding is inexorable.
The final work was more lavish by far: Harrison Birtwistle’s {cq} “Meridian,”
composed in 1971 but only now produced on the West Coast. Birtwistle, in his
late 50s, is Britain’s most enigmatic composer, and one of its finest. Inward,
intense, not easily approached yet thoroughly gripping, his big works have yet
to make headway in this country. “Meridian,” for solo mezzo-soprano, six
female voices in ensemble, and an ensemble of winds, harps and percussion with
solo cello and French horn, exerts its power and lingers in the memory.
The texts are fragments of love poetry by Thomas Wyatt (of the 16th century)
and Christopher Logue (of our own); they are blended into the instrumental
ensemble until the end product becomes a synthesis of spoken and unspoken
drama. As Mary King sang the solos, marvelously enveloped by the ensemble under
Knussen, the stage seemed to glow with radiant imagery.
These were the evening’s highlights. Neither the pretensions of Judith Weir’s
“The Consolations of Scholarship” nor the exuberant but not fully realized
ambitions of Brian Kehlenbach’s “In the Land Beyond Beyond,” came close.
Weir is best known for her “A Night at the Chinese Opera,” greeted with
deserved hostility at the Santa Fe Opera two seasons ago. “Scholarship” is,
blessedly, shorter but no better; again the matter at hand is a setting of
Chinese texts in a self-consciously simplistic manner of little import — this
despite a clever staging worked out for herself by singer Mary King. There was
more promise in the work of Kehlenbach, currently a composition doctoral
candidate at U.S.C. The composer mingles jazz harmonies skillfully into his
ensemble; still his piece is somewhat shapeless, long for its length. As
student music goes, Kehlenbach has made an impressive beginning. We will hear
from him again.