MUSIC REVIEW : New Works at the Japan America Theatre

One of his duties as the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s composer-in-residence, Steven Stucky told a reporter last week, is “to be seen a lot,” to be publicly visible.

Stucky was exactly that--he was ubiquitous, even--Monday night. At the Japan America Theatre he conducted all five works at the latest performance by the Philharmonic’s New Music Group, and did so with energy and authority.

Equally important, he assembled a varied, striking and potent program: To frame first performances of works by himself, William Kraft and Donald Crockett, Stucky chose Schoenberg’s “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte” and Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto.

Crockett’s engrossing “Still Life With Bell” received its world premiere in what seemed a fair and transparent reading by 14 members of the group. A quarter-hour piece in a fragmented but apprehendable atonal style, “Still Life” could easily become the background for an abstract film, or the basis of a dramatic ballet.

Mournful, grating and passionate by turns, Stucky’s 5-year-old Double Concerto for violin, oboe and chamber orchestra arrived at its first West Coast hearing clearly polished and handsomely delivered.

One is tempted to call the work neo-Bartokian, but its actual stylistic identity is much more complex; it broods in a unique manner. Tamara Chernyak and Barbara Winters were the protagonists, interacting responsively with colleagues and with conductor Stucky to produce emotional resonances of a dark kind.

The first complete performance of Kraft’s “Three Settings from ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ ” accomplished similar success.

Performed by soprano Jennifer Trost and a sextet of instrumentalists, and conducted pertinently by Stucky, these musical realizations of poems by Albert Giraud, originally commissioned by the Arnold Schoenberg Institute (as part of the now-concluded “Pierrot Lunaire” project), made a stronger impact as a group than they might individually. Rangy but vocally grateful, they use the instrumental body in colorful and pointed ways, and demand further hearings.

Hector Vasquez was the Reciter and Gloria Cheng the pianist, with a quartet of Philharmonic members, in Schoenberg’s “Ode.” The evening concluded with a sometimes scrappy, often game reading of the “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto.