MUSIC REVIEW : CalArts Players Honor Composers

While 1990 has taken a frightful toll of American music’s most towering figures, it has also showered Mel Powell with belated, much-deserved honor.

However, the shadow of yet another death--that of Aaron Copland on Sunday--haunted the Powell showcase at the Japan America Theatre on Monday night, and the management of the Green Umbrella series chose to honor Copland with three short works at the top of the program.

First, pianist Bryan Pezzone gently played Copland’s touching Piano Blues No. 1 and the enigmatic “Midsummer Nocturne,” with its nostalgic quotes from “Our Town.” Then cellist Erika Duke offered Powell’s own tribute in his spare, angular idiom, “Invocation 1988.”

It is most ironic that, after years of meticulously polishing his tiny atonal gems, Powell should win the Pulitzer Prize this year with a grand gesture for symphony orchestra like “Duplicates.”

Yet the Monday night offering was a spellbinding reminder of the main thrust of this genial composer’s work.

Powell is fascinated by pinpoints of color, the most delicate shadings, the role of silence, the general philosophy of less-is-more. He doesn’t waste a single motion; a stunning piece like “Settings” for soprano and chamber orchestra frames the words in the most delicately crystalline terms.

The performances by members of the New CalArts Twentieth Century Players were often scintillating; obviously they have lived with this music long enough to be able to probe beyond its forbidding technical barriers.

With Stephen Mosko expertly directing traffic, “Modules” received an accurate, virtuosic reading, more expansive than that of this group’s March, 1988, performance at CalArts. And Susan Narucki could match the delicacy of the instrumentalists with her ethereal, floating soprano in “Settings.”