NEW MUSIC AMERICA ’85 : FELDMAN QUINTET, OTHER WORKS PREMIERE AT FEST

Concerts Two and Five in the current New Music America ’85 Festival were short, intermissionless events at the County Museum of Art held at 5 on Friday and Saturday afternoons. Short, yes, but fascinating--one might even say, pithy.

Morton Feldman’s Quintet, which he calls “Piano and String Quartet,” was written expressly for the Kronos Quartet and pianist Aki Takahashi for performance at this festival. Like some other Feldman works, it seems at first overlong for its content, seems to invite clockwatching and taxes the listener’s--any listener’s--patience.

Sixty-eight and one-half minutes long, the quintet deals in quiet music. The prevailing dynamic never rises above mezzo-piano; at least it did not so rise in this world- premiere performance.

At the beginning of the work, musical activity is confined mostly to arpeggiated chords in the piano and disjunct responses from the quartet; later, the dialogue between piano and strings takes different tacks. At no point in the score does anything change strikingly; once begun, the piece offers no surprises.

Its sound profile, then, is inoffensive. The slow-changing of exotic chords at low dynamic levels does not challenge or grate upon the ear. But it does make for one long period of uneventfulness.

The Kronos Quartet--violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud--and pianist Takahashi treated the work with loving tenderness, caressing its barely changing outlines, carefully defining its short dynamic parameters. After the conclusion of the performance, the composer gratefully acknowledged the performers’ successful efforts.

Of course, by that time, a portion of the large audience gathered in Leo S. Bing Theatre at the museum had fled--quietly at first, then, later, with growing bravado.

By chance, one had the opportunity to hear the work again, three hours later, on KUSC-FM, which is broadcasting festival events. The second hearing confirmed one’s impressions: Much does happen in these 68 1/2 minutes, though slowly: A certain inevitability seems to govern the chord-changes, a formal structure emerges, and a number of leitmotifs appear and recur--they even haunt the work. One of them is a chord, spelled, from bottom to top: F; A; G; A-flat.

On the other hand, pleasures of more uncomplicated character dominated the Friday event, a jolly 55-minute appearance by the Repercussion Unit, a six-member, six-composer ensemble of the bang-clang-and-swoosh school.

As you may have heard, this is a performing group of unfailing musicality and strong entertainment values. The six players/composers--John Bergamo, Jim Hildebrandt, Gregg Johnson, Ed Mann, Lucky Mosko and Larry Stein--have fun, make music and hold their observers’ interests.

Friday, those interests were visual as well as aural and focused on some of the equipment--the large, red inflatable, for instance, which made one outstanding appearance--and many instruments.

For the record, both these concerts, along with a third, given Sunday afternoon at the museum, were part of another sequence, the Never on Monday series, presented by Monday Evening Concerts and coordinated by music director Dorrance Stalvey.