CONDUCTOR/COMPOSERS CONCERT : PREVIN DEBUTS WITH NEW MUSIC GROUP

The New Music Group programs of the Los Angeles Philharmonic usually resemble an upscale, downtown version of the august and declining Monday Evening Concerts. Still, the modern chamber-music project at the Japan America Theatre has always concentrated on adventure, not star power.

This Monday, however, the somber Philharmonic series took on a little glitz. After two years as official guru for all local matters symphonic, Andre Previn got around to visiting the resident 20th-Century zealots.

Although there still were plenty of empty spaces in the 841-seat hall, a bigger-than-usual audience turned out to see the maestro in these unaccustomed surroundings. Unfortunately, his new piece turned out to be something of a mixed blessing and, in stylistic context, something of an anachronism.

Previn is no avant-gardist. He isn’t even a hemidemisemi-quasi-avant-gardist.

His musical roots embrace academic propriety, show-biz flash and traditional expressive devices. His music is clever, easy to take, well constructed, supremely eclectic. It makes few demands on the listener. It doesn’t even want to stretch the ears.

On a program dominated by works of composers who also happen to be conductors--a flimsy unifying concept in the first place--he stood out as a conductor who happens also to be a composer.

At the end of an evening that surveyed relatively thorny musical issues via music of Webern, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leon Kirchner and William Kraft, Previn attempted to provide a rousingly slick and snazzy, old-fashioned climax. It certainly was old-fashioned. It also was, alas, an anticlimax.

The piece, written in 1984, is called “Triolet.” In eight brief and desperately disparate sections, it puts a dozen brass virtuosi through some demanding paces. There are jazzy riffs, syncopated flings, languid echoes, macho fanfares, traces of Kurt Weill funk, snatches of Aaron Copland reverie, funny allusions to oom-pah-pah bandstand ritual.

Finally, there is a tongue-in-cheeky little march entitled “Chubbs.” According to an illuminating program note, it is a favorite of Previn’s 3-year-old son, “especially when the words ‘I love a baby who can bounce, bounce, bounce’ are sung to the tune.”

Enough said.

Brilliantly performed by assorted Philharmonic stalwarts, “Triolet” turned out to be long on facile charm, short on substance. The substance seemed especially short compared to Kirchner’s “Music for Twelve” (1985), which sustains and develops complex ideas within a context of transparent sonorities and interlocking, unabashedly dramatic accents.

Kirchner uses a progressive harmonic language here to create a poignant romantic affect. His music appeals to the head as well as the heart.

The composer was on hand to conduct (unobtrusively) the cracker-jack ensemble and to wallow in a new-music-concert equivalent of an ovation.

Kraft, a longtime Philharmonic timpanist and former director of the New Music Group, was on hand to oversee an appreciative performance of his epigrammatic “Melange.” Written the same year as the Kirchner, it offers sonic sensuality with characteristically spicy undercurrents.

It also proves, once again, that percussive lyricism is no contradiction in terms.

Less accessible, obviously gimmicky but still mildly amusing, was Salonen’s “YTA 1” (1982). We know the young Finn as a podium firebrand. However, his skills as a composer remain a bit obscure. So, in this instance, do his intentions.

The management provided no annotation for his short-winded experiment, not even an explanation of the title. This left the listener to marvel at the fleet fortitude of Janet Furguson as she gasped, gurgled, gargled and tootled strange but neat little melodic patterns on and at her electronically amplified alto flute.

The program began with the minute abstractions of Webern’s seminal Concerto for Nine Instruments, deftly conducted by John Harbison. Though it has been around for more than half a century, it sounded more modern than anything else on the program.