MUSIC REVIEW : SONOR Concert Charts Course for Darmstadt

A U.S. passport was included in the fanciful collage that decorated the program for Wednesday evening’s SONOR concert at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Auditorium.

At the invitation of the West German government, the university’s 25-member avant-garde chamber ensemble will be performing in the 34th annual Darmstadt contemporary music festival this July. SONOR has been engaged in the final rounds of preparation for this pilgrimage to the shrine of European new music, so the passport on the cover was an apt symbol.

Symbolic overtones could not be missed in some of the music SONOR performed Wednesday in its pre-Darmstadt sampler. Robert Erickson’s 1984 “Sierra” is the former UCSD resident composer’s rugged paean to his adopted state of California. Baritone Philip Larson, accompanied by 15 instruments weighted toward the bass end of the scale, intoned a litany of places and legendary folk of the Sierra Mountain range, bracketed by quotations from naturalist John Muir.

Like the landscape that inspired Erickson, his contemporary tone poem exuded dark textures, low rumbles and primitive outlines. At times, Larson’s rich baritone was forced into a high falsetto, invoking the wailings of an Indian shaman. A playful undertone, typical of vintage Erickson, mitigated against the more literal programmatic aspects of “Sierra.” This opus is no cute transposition of Ferde Grofe’s “Grand Canyon Suite.”

More difficult to assess was Joji Yuasa’s “Nine Levels of Ze-Ami,” which was given its American premiere Wednesday. This sprawling work for chamber orchestra and quadraphonic computer-generated tape was also structured around a text, a translation of nine 15th-Century aphorisms written by Ze-Ami, a founder of Japanese Noh drama. The text was embedded into the tape component, sometimes articulated in a straightforward manner.

Tom Nee conducted both the Yuasa and the Erickson with his customary low-keyed clarity.