Music Reviews : Philharmonic Group at Japan America

In his ingratiatingly droll manner, Oliver Knussen refers to Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s “Meridian” as “the best piece I can think of that sank without a trace after its premiere.” Knussen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group made a good case for his claim with its West Coast premiere Monday night at the Japan America Theatre.

“Meridian” is technically a song cycle but really isn’t; the voice is just another ingredient in the mix. Birtwistle is most interested in putting together alluring soundscapes--and he comes up with one startlingly original texture after another.

Using two opposing groups of single and double reeds anchored by harps, a lonely solo horn and solo cello up front, and an ethereal female choir in the rear flanked by percussionists, Birtwistle achieves luminous three-dimensional voicings. The pitches slithered and rumbled all over the lot, while mezzo Mary King delivered penetrating, slightly trembling treatments of the texts.

Earlier King put her acting abilities to humorous use in Judith Weir’s “The Consolations of Scholarship,” a weird monodrama of arch, often terse, Stravinsky-influenced music backing partly satirical Chinese mini-plays. King deftly alternated between singing and reciting the texts.

A Philharmonic-commissioned world premiere, Brian Kehlenbach’s “In the Land Beyond Beyond,” was little more than 12 minutes of constant, glittering activity. While Kehlenbach initiates some welcome tension with an insistent motif in the first section, the rest of the piece reminded one of a chatterbox who must fill in every silence whether or not he/she has anything to say.

As for Morton Feldman’s “For Frank O’Hara,” one can’t deny that the late composer once again achieved his goal of producing “a flat surface with a minimum of contrast.” Some find spiritual nirvana in this, but these ears only hear arid, shapeless, toneless, thoroughly tiresome note spinning.