Music Review : Kim Work Tops the Bill at Monday Evening Concert

The latest Monday Evening Concert at Bing Theater served as pleasing model of the original intent of the series, offering an interesting, only occasionally routine program of music written within the last 30 years. In their first concert of the season the MEC Ensemble was lead by Stephen Mosko and soprano Susan Narucki was the spotlighted soloist.

Each composition demonstrated skillful techniques and a sophisticated language, though only one by Earl Kim produced anything especially memorable. Nevertheless, Mosko’s spirited, apt direction yielded polished performances.

The Los Angeles premiere of Kim’s ambitious “Exercises En Route” (1960-69)--given in a concert version of the multimedia work--served as a tribute to the composer’s 70th birthday in January. Four movements for soprano and small chamber ensemble consist of short, carefully constructed pitch structures occurring between long silences that create a meditative, continuous development.

Like most of Kim’s vocal music, the texts are by Samuel Beckett and Narucki delivered them with an admirably controlled vibrancy. Although generally convincing, her dramatic impact drifted in and out of focus, treating the Sprechgesang and other spoken parts more timidly.

In another birthday salute, pianists Delores Stevens and Dorothy Stone (usually a flutist) read through Milton Babbitt’s static “Don”(1981), for piano four hands. Unlike Babbitt’s other serial piano music, this tribute to composer Donald Martino’s 50th birthday lacked virtuosity and provided little that was substantial. Fred Lerdahl’s quirky “Fantasy Etudes”(1985) mixed tremolos, ragtime riffs, minimalism and a playful start-and-stop forward motion. Opening the evening were expert performances of Bernard Rands’ impressionistic “. . . in the receding mist . . .”(1988) and Henry Cowell’s humorously cacophonous “26 Simultaneous Mosaics”(1963).