SAMUEL CONDUCTS MUSEUM CONCERT

Composer/conductor Gerhard Samuel’s activities have been based in Cincinnati for the last 11 years. Visits to Los Angeles, however, have kept his presence fresh among the friends and followers he earned during his tenures here.

That was readily apparent as Samuel led the latest Monday Evening Concert. The audience in Bing Theater at the County Museum of Art seemed larger than usual, and the persistent applause of a vociferous few gave the performers more curtain calls than usual.

Samuel responded to the occasion with a program tighter and more coherent than many offerings in the Monday Evening series. There were intriguing musical and emotional resonances, intensifications and extensions in his Schoenberg-Kurtag-Samuel progression.

Works by Gyorgy Kurtag have arrived in Los Angeles only recently. (The Philharmonic New Music Group will present another next Monday.)Reasons for the interest in the 60-year-old Budapest composer were easily heard in “Scenes From a Novel,” although as a quasi-dramatic work it disappointed.

Musically, the 15 short songs of “Scenes” are old/new admixtures. Traditional Hungarian folk elements quite recognizable in the accompanying ensemble of violin, bass and cimbalom--a type of hammered dulcimer--were reinterpreted and parodied in an obsessive, centripetal contemporary style.

Against a background often of drones and ostinatos, soprano Miriam Abramowitsch sang remarkably suave melodies--wide leaping and chromatic, to be sure, but uncommonly supple, and poignant rather than pouting. Her voice strained a bit at the top, but she projected the texts clearly and eloquently.

And there lay the dramatic rub. Whatever the value of Rimma Dalos’ poems in the original Russian, in Samuel’s English adaptation of a translation by Ross Lauroff they were at the level of a Creative Writing Club that has just discovered haiku and Rod McKuen. “Allow me--permit me/to touch you/to melt/to dissolve in you” might work in a disco setting, but it certainly undercut Kurtag’s moody efforts.

Samuel’s own recent “Nocturne for an Impossible Dream” proved a more completely satisfying achievement. Dedicated to the memory of the composer’s mother, “Nocturne” is cast in a single, solid, perceptibly shaped movement of distinctly elegiac atmosphere.

A complex yet expressive part for solo violin--ably played by Peter Marsh--carries the discourse, occasionally shadowed and questioned by a solo clarinet. Strings, piano and percussion comprise the accompaniment, handled with an ear for understated emotional nuance.

Samuel conducted a fine group of prominent local players, including three of the four members of the Sequoia Quartet. He opened the program with a fluent, almost overly mellow, reading of Schoenberg’s Suite, Opus 29.