Music Reviews : American Retrospective at Schoenberg Hall

The third event in the “Retrospective” at UCLA was held on Monday and was really two concerts separated by an intermission.

On the first portion were six rather conventional chamber works. The second part was devoted to works played by the UCLA Contemporary Gamelan Ensemble.

American composers writing for Gamelan have usually attempted to combine elements of Western music with those of Indonesian music, with varying degrees of success.

In Lou Harrison’s “Bubaran Robert,” for instance, the piccolo trumpet, played handsomely by Carolyn O’Keefe, sounded disturbingly out of tune as it combined with the Gamelan’s slendro (five-tone) tuning.

In Elaine Barkin’s “Encore (No More),” the disunity resulted from her combining of the slendro and pelog (seven-tone) tunings and from the rhythmic stagnation that occurred during moments of improvisation. The work came off as at a least partial success, however, for she incorporated Western melodic patterns effectively. More cogent was Robert Lombardo’s “Slendrone,” in which melody and counterpoint are treated in the fashion of Western music.

All of the works played before intermission showed redeeming characteristics, though none proved especially memorable. There were a couple of poignant melodies in John Steinmetz’s Sonata for Bassoon and Piano, for which he and pianist Johana Harris-Heggie were the able performers, but the listener had to sit through much repetitious banging and wailing to hear them.

Harris-Heggie brought sensitivity to Paul Bowles’ Post-Romantic Five Preludes; she and violist Evan Wilson gave an earnest account of Roy Harris’ academic “Soliloquy and Dance.” Harris-Heggie and pianist John Heggie began the program with three accessible works, the most attractive being Isadore Freed’s Neoclassical “Carnival.”