Music Reviews : Season Finale of Green Umbrella Concerts

The first season of Green Umbrella concerts, the co-operative new music venture of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and CalArts, ended Monday, though not as originally hoped. Only a portion of Hans Werner Henze’s “Voices” was offered in a sparsely inhabited Japan America Theatre.

“Voices” is Henze’s 1973 Marxist epic, 22 songs of social and political revolution for two uninhibited singers and 15 intrepid instrumentalists. The music is deceptively difficult, despite its clear textures and parodies of popular national/ethnic stereotypes.

On this occasion, tenor Paul Sperry applied himself with characteristic skill and conviction to eight of the songs. He put his bright, clear voice firmly in articulate, sensitive service of the varied texts, easily delivering the heavily ironic, often bitter, exigent emotions of both poetry and music.

As recently as two weeks ago, the conductor for the concert was still unnamed. Thomas Nee, conductor of the UC San Diego ensemble SONOR, finally took the assignment. He guided the CalArts New Twentieth Century Players in carefully balanced, sharply defined performances, alert to Henze’s interactive ensemble subtleties.

Sperry also brought the concert to a dramatic, humorous close, gowned as a preacher in a semi-staged performance of Louis Gruenberg’s “The Daniel Jazz.” An amazingly farsighted work for its time (1924), “The Daniel Jazz” is largely a historical curiosity today, missing both the inventive freedom of jazz and the pulpit-pounding rhythms of Vachel Lindsay’s poem, despite Sperry’s active efforts. Nee kept the equivocal accompaniment all too polite.

The rest of the program was filled with two chamber pieces recently performed elsewhere locally, and Bryan Pezzone’s “Hommage to Ralph Shapey.” Pezzone, head of the piano department at CalArts, played his own clangorous toccata with an extrovert fury that did not preclude finesse.

Robert Erickson’s Trio for clarinet, cello and harp is an attractive, conservative piece that offers grateful ensemble work, emphasizing musical communion rather than the separate-but-equal virtuosity common to so many contemporary chamber pieces. William Powell, Erika Duke and Susan Allen gave it the benefit of a supple, well-polished reading.

Flutist Rachel Rudich, oboist Vicky Velich, trumpeter Eirikur Palsson, Powell and bassoonist Julie Feves presented Mel Powell’s pert, neo-Classical Divertimento with vigorous elan, and more weight in the soulful, songful Largo than they had at the CalArts Contemporary Music Festival this year.