Music and Dance Reviews : Marshall Premiere Under Green Umbrella

The “Notes Across the Border” theme for the Green Umbrella program of American and Mexican pieces was a bit strained, considering that the headliner premiere was composed in Vermont. The assembled pieces, though, had a rare mutual resonance, and benefited from typically alert, committed playing from the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, conducted by David Alan Miller Tuesday at the Japan America Theatre.

With its clear-cut, sectional structure and simple (not simplistic) writing, “A Peaceable Kingdom” is not a piece that passeth all understanding. Neither, however, is it completely the placid thing the composer suggests in his printed annotation.

Ingram Marshall combines evocative, tonally oriented music for a small chamber orchestra with taped sounds of bells and a Dalmatian funeral. There is a Coplandesque benediction for the instruments towards the end, but the jangly bell sections are tense and the portions built around the funeral--a mournful provincial band, voices chanting and crying--generate tremendous poignancy.

There is much affecting, somber beauty in “A Peaceable Kingdom,” which Miller and the New Music Group delivered capably. Despite (or because of?) the amplification, the strings occasionally sounded thin and strident in their glosses on the tape sections, suggesting that the piece might work better with larger forces. But the performance communicated a well-shaped expression of pathos and contemplation.

Leading up to the premiere were works from an eight-year span of the ‘30s and ‘40s, and Morton Subotnick’s “Trembling” from 1983. Violinist Barry Socher and pianist Zita Carno played the latter with concentrated grace, their figurations and long-breathed melodies made throbbing and/or liquescent by Subotnick’s “ghost electronic” processing.

“The Song of Quetzalcoatl” by Lou Harrison, and Carlos Chavez’ Toccata are odd but effective companions for percussion. The American wrote a pre-Columbian fantasy, while the Mexican composer created a formal neo-Classical mini-symphony. Miller and six percussionists gave spirited, though not invariably tight, accounts.

The fulcrum for the program was Silvestre Revueltas’ “Planos,” a compact, high-voltage nonet filled with intimations of Stravinskyan jazz and street bustle. Miller lead an energetic performance of clear textures and rhythmic purpose.