MUSIC REVIEW : Sacred Works at Japan America

Contemporary composers have tended to travel musically in academic herds. The liberating influences of recent years, however, have taken many down more personal paths.

Some have even found occasion to write religious music. New music has never been missing from church and synagogue, but sacred music has not figured largely in the work of the younger, trendier composers more frequently heard in secular concert venues.

Monday evening at the Japan America Theatre, the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group presented strong, varied compositional voices preaching the good news of sacred music, without a hint of saccharine, timidity or condescension.

The program was Philharmonic new music adviser John Harbison’s final act before returning to Boston and, shortly after, a year in Italy. He conducted the always able NMG players in each of the works with poised competence.

Harbison is himself a composer of numerous and noted sacred works, winning a Pulitzer Prize last year for “The Flight Into Egypt.” He closed this concert with his “Confinement,” a piece from 1965 receiving its West Coast premiere.

“Confinement” is a tight, edgy 15-minute instrumental expression of moody anger, frustration, resignation and ultimate acceptance, occasioned by the illness and death of the composer’s father. Its sounds range from guttural growls to strident howls, the coloristic passions restrained by almost oppressive constructions.

Also heard in its first West Coast performance was Shulamit Ran’s setting of Psalm 93, “Adonai malach.” Cantor Joseph Gole had difficulty delivering the lower end of the wide ranging, declamatory lines, vigorously shadowed by Robert Watt’s clarion horn work, while a trio of woodwinds provided chittering punctuation.

Christopher Rouse’s “Rotae Passionis” is a dramatic, hyper-pictorial interpretation of the Stations of the Cross for an instrumental octet, vividly led by clarinetist David Howard. Rouse’s bold musical imagery--slithering sandpaper rasps, heavy hammer blows, the clarinet creating sympathetic vibrations blowing across timpani--made the recourse to a central slide show quite redundant, and unnecessarily distracting.

The theater proved not as hospitable sonically to Frederick Lesemann’s brightly attractive “Alleluia . . . in domo per saecula” as the USC University Church had last year in its premiere, but soprano Rebecca Sherburn again soared in its clean, elegant lines, deftly partnered by clarinetist Lorin Levee against the shifting background of antiphonal brass.

Sherburn also sang the program opener, Dallipiccola’s “Parole di San Paola” (1964), with deceptively innocent ease. Harbison guided a supple, radiant performance of this unduly neglected setting of the so-called “Love” chapter from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthiians.