CODA: FESTIVE AND ECLECTIC

The Krenek Festival came to a flamboyant close Sunday afternoon with a lot of people on the stage of the spacious Mandeville Auditorium and, once again, an embarrassingly sparse audience out front. The valedictory enlisted three soloists and, where needed, Thomas Nee conducting ensembles of various combinations and permutations from the excellent La Jolla Civic-University Orchestra.

Krenek himself provided the prelude--”Three Merry Marches,” Opus 44--and the denouement--”The Arc of Life,” an unnumbered opus completed in 1981. The marches, dated 1926, are bright, spunky, peppery little pieces that hark happily to a time when Krenek wrote music for the masses. The “Arc,” first performed by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, is a poignant example of the intellectual Krenek at his most refined and most compact.

The rest of the program surveyed Krenek disciples. George Perle was represented with a matching pair of Monodies: a fascinating essay in flute convolutions (sweetly played by Ann LaBerge) and a gutsy microdrama for contrabass (assertively stroked and plunked by Bertram Turetzky). Will Ogdon’s Five Preludes introduced exceptionally poised, serene and subtle duets for violin (the elegant Janos Negyesy) and chamber orchestra. Negyesy returned later for Glenn Glasow’s “Rakka,” a provocative if rather uneasy fusion of wispy fiddling and ethereal electronics in the service of a 10th-Century haiku.

The most ambitious item on the agenda turned out to be the “Elegy in Memory of Robert F. Kennedy” by Gladys Nordenstrom, a.k.a. Mrs. Krenek. Remembered from a performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1971, the elegy remains a big, splashy, well-crafted essay in abstract theatricality. Nee and his eager charges imbued it with clarity and climactic tension.

At the end of the concert, a frail but apparently hail Krenek was helped to the stage where he acknowledged the de rigueur standing ovation, maintained an air of stoicism as the orchestra ventured Carol Plantamura’s piquant arrangement of “Happy Birthday,” and, with a little help from the conductor, blew out 85 candles on the biggest cake in the West.

Perhaps Los Angeles will celebrate him properly on his 90th birthday.