Music Reviews : Ziegler Leads Ensemble in UK/LA ’88 Concert

Robert Ziegler, now a resident of London, returned to his hometown this week to conduct the Monday Evening Concerts Ensemble in the latest installment of its series in Bing Theater at the County Museum of Art. Ziegler’s program of new music for chamber orchestra--also part of the UK/LA ’88 Festival--included two West Coast premieres and a U.S. premiere, all by composers who reside in the United Kingdom.

By far, the most challenging and engaging of the three premieres was Harrison Birtwistle’s “Secret Theatre.” Like his British colleagues Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, Birtwistle’s music mixes post-World War II avant-garde sensibilities with the more tuneful traditions of English composers like Benjamin Britten.

In “Secret Theatre,” a verse/chorus interplay between the orchestra (mostly playing a cacophony of complex rhythms) and solo instruments (mostly playing slow unison lines) at times brings the listener to the brink of chaos. Ziegler’s steady conducting kept the performance under control while the soloists--including Dorothy Stone on flute, David Sherr on oboe, and Julian Spear on clarinet--delivered adroitly.

Another hard-hitting composition, Robert Saxton’s Chamber Symphony (“The Circles of Light”), based on the nine concentric rings in Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” starts with a cliched opening with soft tam-tams and sustained tone clusters in the lower register of the piano, but continues with quick motivic fragments and other passages of various modalities. The result is busy but avoids being overtly cryptic.

Judith Weir’s “The Consolations of Scholarship” maintains a heterophonic texture throughout, using simple tonal harmonies. Intended as a re-creation of the storytelling dramas from China’s Yuan dynasty, the work bogs down in its own childlike simplicity and wooden characters. Soprano/storyteller Jeannine Wagner delivered a slightly awkward performance that added little to the anemic drama.

The evening opened with a warm-up performance of Britten’s Sinfonietta, Opus 1, that suffered from intonation problems.