Music Reviews : Harvesting the Composed Fruits of <i> Glasnost</i>

The musical fruits of a U.S./U.S.S.R. Composers Conference were presented in concerts Monday and Tuesday evenings.

The first program, part of the Monday Evening Concerts series at the County Museum of Art, proved divisible not along national lines, but more fundamentally simply into the quick and the dead. For a variety of reasons, a feeling of inertia clung to much of the music.

Holding the pole position in both literal quickness and incongruity was 24-year-old Leonid Ptashko, who bravely tried to make Bing Theater swing with a set of frenetic jazz improvisations, ranging from an opening Chopin parody through modal moodiness and explorations of damper effects to full-tilt jazz.

Equally lively were Carl Stone’s “Hop Ken” and Joan La Barbara’s “Time(d) Trials and Unscheduled Events.” The latter is a well-shaped, energetically chittering collage of taped gasps, sighs, wheezes and grunts, with the final layer added live, in a nonchalant display of La Barbara’s extended vocal techniques.

La Barbara’s sounds are not processed, but she obtains some of the same effects as Stone does through MIDI-controlled sampling. His increasingly familiar “Hop Ken” manipulates and reenergizes fragments of “Pictures at an Exhibition” into a kaleidoscopic, pulsating ode to electronic joy.

Slow but far from dead was Elena Firsova’s “Misterioso,” a structurally rounded elegy, full of fluttering trills and chill, sustained unisons, cautiously delivered by violinists Barry Socher and Ruth Johnson, violist Carole Mukogawa and cellist Erica Duke.

On the other hand, long, shapeless pastorales at the beginning and end of “The Twelve Tribes”--for flute and string quartet--by James Newton, gave it a vapid feeling, despite a peppy central movement and two wide-ranging, jazz-tinged flute cadenzas. The composer presented the demanding flute solos forcefully, and the “Misterioso” string cast labored diligently.

Victor Ekimovsky’s “Die Ewige Wiederkunft” returned a short motif, seemingly forever, in an obsessive but uncompelling exploration of the bass clarinet. David Ocker provided security and commitment on Ekimovsky’s behalf.

A rare heckler hissed loudly from the back row through most of “Die Ewige Wiederkunft,” and backbenchers also talked loudly during “Hop Ken” and Ptashko’s performances. Who would have thought that a product of glasnost might produce cultural hooliganism in a Monday Evening Concert?

The second installment, Tuesday at Hancock Auditorium, USC, proved more consistently engaging.

The Soviets were again represented by pieces for small forces, and when Ekimovsky’s “Up in the Hunting Dogs” was pulled from the agenda, we lost the only opportunity to hear what a Soviet composer is doing with tape.

Ekimovsky’s replacement was Anatolii Zatin, who, like Ptashko the night before, jolted the audience with a high-voltage performance of his own piano music. In this case, it was not jazz, but a florid demonstration of Romantic virtuosity in the form of his “Paganini Concert Fantasy in Six Etudes.”

Firsova’s one-movement “Spring” Sonata proved a partner to her “Misterioso” quartet in form, craftsmanship and reflective spirit, though in a more lyrically sustained vein. Flutist Jennifer Keeney and pianist Gloria Cheng stated its case with assurance.

A tightly knit, neo-Baroque Partita for solo violin by Dmitri Smirnov, Firsova’s husband, benefited from an intense performance by James Hsu. His tone went edgy occasionally, but Hsu held nothing back and seemed little daunted by the manifold challenges.

The Soviet pieces, of course, were all U.S. premieres. The Americans also offered the world premiere of Arthur Jarvinen’s “The Queen of Spain,” the U.S. premiere of Donald Crockett’s “to be sung on the water,” and the West Coast premiere of Michael Torke’s “Adjustable Wrench.”

“to be sung on the water,” a truly pretty piece in the best sense, received remarkable playing courtesy of violinist Michelle Makarski and violist Ronald Copes. They presented its irregularly undulating double-stops with suave precision, in a beautifully balanced, lyrically poised reading.

Jarvinen extracted “The Queen of Spain” from a Scarlatti sonata and exaggerated its parody aspects with cheesy synthesized harpsichord sounds. Mark Robson and Cheng played it forcefully, accompanied by bass drum irruptions from Barry Larkin.

At the end of the program was “Adjustable Wrench,” sounding very much like a minimalist deconstruction of a big band hit. Stephen Hartke’s fanfare “Precession” opened the proceedings on strident notes, followed by his elegant untitled set of three miniatures reflected on paintings. Crockett and the USC Contemporary Music Ensemble gave all these works crisp, committed performances.