MUSIC REVIEW : Harbison Leads Two Premieres

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra usually makes do, these days, with a music director who fiddles while the ensemble churns.

Friday night at Thorne Hall on the hospitable Occidental College campus, the management reverted to its former habits, presenting the first of three concerts with a baton-wielding guest-maestro. Even so, some perplexing questions lingered regarding interpretive authority.

John Harbison, who temporarily inherited the leadership duties from Iona Brown, isn’t exactly a seasoned podium virtuoso. He had been engaged, no doubt, because he is a composer--a justly celebrated composer at that.

The program chosen for the occasion included two relatively complex premieres. One, not incidentally, was by Harbison himself. Obviously, a conductor’s undivided attention was needed here.

Harbison reminded us that he is a serious, careful, thoughtful musician. He knows how to keep the cantilena flowing. He knows how to analyze a score. He knows how to beat time, usually with both hands.

Unfortunately, such niceties as subtle inflection, dynamic nuance and expressive flexibility tend to elude his prosaic maneuvers. He remains a rather stiff and primitive technician.

Our Chamber Orchestra, long accustomed to providing exact responses to vague commands, did its considerable best to accommodate his seemingly unstated wishes. The rehearsal time had, no doubt, been well spent.

Still, this was hardly a concert notable for interpretive elegance or eloquence. The music, not the music-making, was the thing.

Harbison allowed himself two obligatory gestures toward the so-called standard repertory of the ancient past. He began the evening with square and stilted performances of sinfonias from two Bach cantatas, Nos. 75 and 42. After intermission, a bit more relaxed, he presided over a relatively graceful run-through of Haydn’s Parisian Symphony No. 84.

Essentially, these well-meant pedantries functioned as program padding. The main agenda involved the first performance anywhere of Stephen Hartke’s Symphony No. 2 and the West Coast premiere of Harbison’s Viola Concerto (1989).

The novelties share certain superficial similarities. Each lasts about half an hour. Each explores traditional structures. Each seems to want to speak a lush romantic language, though the regressive impulse is safely masked by gentle clashes of modernist harmony.

Hartke, the 39-year-old composer-in-residence with the Chamber Orchestra, toys with the easy cliches of broad dramatic contrasts. He veers busily from muted contrapuntal episodes to violent percussive outbursts to hymn-like quasi-resolutions.

The most arresting element in his pleasant if somewhat academic exercise comes at the end, in the form of an extended elegy for solo cello. Douglas Davis played it with extraordinary resonance and brooding pathos.

Harbison’s viola showpiece--commissioned jointly by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the New Jersey Symphony and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra--turns out to be more intricate. Suavely and cleverly, it weaves melodic detail in and out of ever-changing instrumental textures, utilizes incidental solos in surprising combinations and permutations, and eventually gives in to a lush exoticism worthy of Richard Strauss.

The composer told the audience in a program note and in a redundant little speech that he used to play the viola himself. Familiarity in this case has bred idiomatic writing. The instrumental protagonist is given remarkably grateful, remarkably daunting opportunities for convoluted introspection one moment and for convoluted bravura the next.

Marcus Thompson made the most of those opportunities. He did so, moreover, with heroic, breezy nonchalance.