PHILHARMONIC NEW MUSIC SERIES : A KNIGHT HAS HIS DAY: L.A. CELEBRATES TIPPETT

Everybody loves a hero. In Los Angeles Monday night, the hero was a gentlemanly iconoclast from England who happens to write beautiful music: Sir Michael Tippett.

The mayor sent him a festive proclamation. Local aficionados of the lyric muse--especially those who think the lyric muse is still alive and well--lavished upon him the sort of reverence he has long deserved but achieved only with the advent of safe old age. Most important, the New Music Group of the Los Angeles Philharmonic presented a sprawling “Totally Tippett” concert at the Japan America Theatre.

The excuse for this slightly belated celebration was Tippett’s 80th birthday, which took place on Jan. 2. The program booklet for the birthday concert contained inevitable gush from our music-director-to-be, Andre Previn; from our principal guest conductor, Simon Rattle, and our ex-principal-guest-conductor-to-be, Michael Tilson Thomas; from our official resident modernist, William Kraft, and, perhaps most telling, from our executive orchestral guru, Ernest Fleischmann.

Unblushingly, Fleischmann called Tippett “the greatest British composer of the 20th Century.” This little flight of critical absolutism didn’t just slight Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Walton and Britten. It also raised the specter of a credibility crisis.

If the Philharmonic management really holds Tippett in such extraordinarily high esteem, one must ask why the orchestra has ventured only three of his compositions in its entire history, and repeated none. One also might wonder why the big birthday bash involved nothing symphonic during the regular subscription season--only a small concert with small forces attracting a small audience in a small hall.

Oh well, people tend to get carried away around here when a genuine knight comes to town. At least it was a nice small concert.

With or without hyperbole, Tippett remains a masterful, genuinely compelling, intrinsically original composer. An evening of his chamber music is a welcome proposition, this year or any year.

The New Music Group survey began with Tippett’s earliest published work, the String Quartet of 1935 as revised in 1944, and continued with the world premiere of a Philharmonic commission, the Piano Sonata No. 4. After intermission came the Sonata for Four Horns of 1955, which had proven particularly appealing at a Philharmonic Composer’s Choice concert at UCLA in 1978, plus the “Songs for Dov,” distilled in 1970 from the opera “The Knot Garden.”

Although each of the four pieces revealed a character of its own, one could note no striking stylistic evolution. The 29-year-old Tippett of the String Quartet apparently spoke the same sophisticated, elegiac language as the 79-year-old Tippett of the Sonata. The accent and the focus changed, of course, but the refinement of gesture, the intellectual provocation and the expressive pathos did not.

Tippett never was the most economical or the most spontaneous of composers. The listener is conscious of the thought behind every hemidemisemiquaver, not to mention the pervasive concern for balance and architectural logic. Even his short pieces seem long. Even his light ones seem heavy.

There is more than a saving grace, however, in his grace. Tippett writes complex music, clever music, clean music, civilized music. He is, in the best sense, a modernist--one who never had to trouble himself with a need to sound modern.

His music was in good hands Monday. The Daria Quartet (Tamara Chernyak, Barry Socher, Evan Wilson and Howard Colf) brought supple, opulent tone and ensemble sensitivity to the elegant convolutions of the introductory String Quartet. Paul Crossley, Tippet’s keyboard Boswell, explored the broad sonic and developmental possibilities of the new Piano Sonata with percussive force and elasticity of phrase.

The Los Angeles Horn Quartet (William Lane, Todd Miller, James Thatcher and Brian Drake) bustled with virtuosic nonchalance through the contrapuntal mazes of the Horn Sonata.

The eerie, witty, psycho-theatrical, quasi-mystical utterances of “Dov” enlisted a spiffy chamber orchestra with a very spry Tippett serving as an obviously authoritative but rather primitive conductor. Thomas Randle served as an artful but rather timid tenor soloist.

The Tippett celebration will continue to flourish, as it should, throughout the music world throughout the year. One of its more interesting manifestations, incidentally, will take place at the Malvern Festival--essentially a Tippett Festival--in Worcestershire on May 29, when Sir Michael judges a marmalade competition.

Ah, to be in England. . . .