Music Reviews : Piano Duo Presents a Range of New Music

Polished performances of four local premieres and two other works provided a panorama of recent musical thinking at the latest Monday Evening Concert in Bing Theater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The piano duo Double Edge--Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles--gave an intelligent recital representing various contrasting styles, from tonality to atonality, from Neo-Classicism to chance music.

On the whole, the Niemann-Tilles duo plays sensitively and neatly, never showing off or allowing the music to plunge out of control. The duo’s smooth shifting of gears from one style to another reminds the listener of chamber groups, like the Kronos Quartet, which synthesize different 20th-Century styles in one program.

David Borden’s “The Continuing Story of Counterpoint, Part 2” (1982), applies a sophisticated approach to the otherwise less-intellectual dogma of Minimalism. These complexities give Borden’s music a more multifarious quality than that of most of his peers.

Stravinsky’s four-movement Concerto for Two Solo Pianos (1935) gave the duo a different kind of challenge, though no less well-executed.

The sweeping virtuosic passages of Mel Powell’s atonal “A Setting for Two Pianos” (1987) impresses with its combination of carefully wrought phrases and forms. John Cage’s long, tranquil collection of tone clusters, “Two for Two Pianos” (1989) at times wearied the listener, yet proved an attractively constructed piece using chance procedures.

Two more West Coast premieres, “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s “The Great Seal (Transmigration)” (1990) and Meredith Monk’s “Phantom Waltz” (1989), both explore tonality in a simple, understated way that provides some interest, though less substantially than the other works. A ragtime encore closed the evening.