Music Reviews : Adams Conducts Premieres in Green Umbrella Series

A sleek, 20th-Century train, streaking across the plains--the image seems at once recent and old-fashioned, contemporary and reassuring, Romantic but relevant.

So, too, the scores of John Adams, racing across 1980s sensibilities, combine the power of newness with the power of familiarity. Adams’ musical engines may be made up of used parts, but they travel at bracing speeds and with an almost frightening sense of direction.

Introduced to New York in October, the American composer’s latest orchestral vehicle is “Fearful Symmetries.” It reached the West Coast Tuesday night in Royce Hall at UCLA, conducted by the Adams himself, who built the program leading up to it with awesome canniness and showmanship.

Programming is an art the secrets of which elude many otherwise gifted musicians. If the Green Umbrella concert put together for the combined Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group and CalArts Twentieth Century Players is representative, Adams belongs among the elite of musical agenda makers.

He began this one with bows to the contemporary past in smooth performances (by the CalArts group) of Harrison Birtwistle’s 11-year-old “Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum” and Morton Feldman’s “The Viola in My Life” (1970).

He sent his listeners out to intermission suitably revved up from the West Coast premiere of Michael Torke’s hypnotic and shattered “Ash,” as played by the New Music Group.

He then built another strong auditory climax in the United States premiere performance of Henryk Gorecki’s diesel-enginelike Harpsichord Concerto.

Then, when he had prepared all listeners, and they were now clearly ready for a full treatment of motoric musical chugging, Adams unleashed the combined ensembles in the irresistible “Fearful Symmetries.”

At the end there were, as there had been in smaller degrees all evening, yelps and squeals and hollers. Royce Hall was not full to overflowing, but the virtually solid mass of listeners downstairs made a happy racket at this conclusion.

What they loved is hard to discount. In brief but pertinent spoken program notes, the boyish composer--who turned 42 on Wednesday--talked about “the wholesomeness of art,” and compared himself with his less famous Polish colleague, Gorecki, in “raw energy and simple humanity.” These may be matters of opinion, but they are opinions widely held among followers of so-called Minimal Music, a category into which these three differing works have been put.

“Fearful Symmetries”--the composer said on Tuesday that the title came after the music was written--uses Adams’ many orchestral devices to full effect. The work is said to be scored for the same size ensemble that played “Nixon in China,” 48 players with the addition of saxophones and a synthesizer.

The sound at times recalls pit bands from shows of the 1940s and ‘50s; there were moments, near the beginning of the 27-minute piece, which reminded one of the neo-’20s sound in Jule Styne’s opening-scene music to “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Certainly, Adams enjoys recycling the swing harmonies of that era.

But he varies his materials steadily in this slowly and sometimes surprisingly unfolding work. The climaxes are placed carefully, of course, yet seem to grow out of the materials. If by “simple humanity,” Adams means uncluttered musical rhetoric, he has described himself well.

Attractive also were the Gorecki piece, in which Zita Carno unfazedly served as soloist, and Torke’s ingenious homage to Beethoven, a quarter-hour of trickily juxtaposed shards of melody, rhythm and (mostly) two-chord fragments, a galop in search of a bolero.

At the beginning, Birtwistle’s musical visualization of Paul Klee’s style grabbed and held interest in a solid, unperturbed reading. After that, David Stenske was the sensitive and well-projected soloist in the Feldman work.