HENZE WORKS PRESENTED AT MONDAY NIGHT SERIES

It is remarkable that a significant piece by one of the world’s most talked-about composers has taken eight years to work its way to Los Angeles. But a late performance is still a welcome one, particularly in the sterling reading given it Monday evening at the County Museum of Art during the New Music L.A. 1987 Festival.

The composer is Hans Werner Henze, the politically minded German conservative modernist, the work “El Rey de Harlem” (The King of Harlem). Henze took Francisco Garcia Lorca’s highly evocative and unsettling poem and created a work fraught with tension, anguish and strikingly vivid imagery. While employing the traditional expressionistic instrumental effects--muted brass, shrill E-flat clarinet--Henze achieved a good deal of originality of timbre. Moreover, periods of feverish Angst are offset by moments of haunting reflectivity.

Mezzo soprano Maureen McNalley, to whom the work was dedicated, delivered the challenging vocal line with extraordinary clarity and profound feeling. It was perhaps the composer’s single oversight that the instrumental ensemble on occasion wholly obfuscated the singer’s words.

This Monday Evening Concert also offered the first performance of Kenneth Rouse’s “Dualities,” a rhythmically charged, colorful work for guitar, voice and ensemble. Soprano Susan Judy delivered the composer’s own rather naively pretentious text with unemotional directness, and David Tanenbaum rendered the guitar part with elan.

Henze’s “An eine Aeolsharfe” for guitar and ensemble, heard here in its U.S. premiere, provided much-need relief from the highly charged tension that preceded. Though handsomely constructed, the Schoenbergian work proved bland and unoriginal, but did give Tanenbaum further opportunity to exhibit his ample technique.

In all three works, conductor Joel Thome led precise, energetic performances.