Music Review : Salonen Folds Up Green Umbrella Season

Relatively quickly, Esa-Pekka Salonen has gone from Esa-who? to standard-bearer of the local music establishment, while still music director-in-waiting for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His name on the program probably accounted for the larger than usual Green Umbrella turnout, Monday at the Japan America Theatre.

As a composer, however, Salonen remains largely unknown here. And of all the possible compositional surprises from the serious young Finn, who expected whimsy?

Of course his title, “Floof, Songs of a Homeostatic Homer,” suggested as much. In its U.S. premiere, this immediately engaging, vertiginous revel in nonsense-with-a-message capped an evening of little big pieces from the Philharmonic New Music Group, closing the ensemble’s 10th season.

The inspired Carrollian texts come from the Polish science- fiction satirist, Stanislaw Lem. Only at beginning and end, though, are the words understandable, with seven verses in the middle going by in a virtuosic yodel as if transmitted from a modem at high speed.

Soprano Lisa Saffer was the fearless protagonist, the computer-poet stammering plausibly towards coherence, then taking off into the stratosphere with bright, whooping abandon. Floof, indeed.

Salonen surrounds the voice with almost equally frenetic chittering from an amplified quintet of piano, synthesizer, clarinet, cello and percussion. He opens with mock-Stravinskyan obsessions, then slips into a high-voltage, kaleidoscopic ensemble tour de force. The composer conducted with the emphasis on energy and an exuberantly unfettered sort of precision.

The soprano also offered the West Coast premieres of works by Bright Sheng and Oliver Knussen. She navigated the lyrical crests of Knussen’s unaccompanied “Four Late Poems and an Epigram of Rainer Maria Rilke” with clean, clear sound, intensely reflective despite skirting the edge of unintentional comedy with the composer’s literal setting of the word Gong! .

The traditional ethnic elements of Sheng’s “Three Chinese Love Songs” jostled somewhat uncomfortably with Saffer’s traditional Western vocal production, though perhaps that is part of the point. John Hayhurst provided rich and pointed accompanimental cross-currents on viola, colored quietly by the composer at the piano.

Interwoven with Saffer’s efforts was a mini-recital from Heinz Holliger, oboist de rigueur to the European avant garde. He too had an unaccompanied vehicle, Berio’s familiar “Sequenza VII,” which he delivered with characteristic elan and clarion tone.

Holliger re-created its expressive thrust in Berio’s “Chemins IV,” an intensification of the solo with increasingly agitated commentary from a small string band. Salonen led the effort purposefully, and also conducted a string septet in Holliger’s own “Eisblumen,” an eerie exercise in harmonics, with mania clearly present beneath the chill surface.

Franco Donatoni’s “Holly,” co-commissioned by the Philharmonic, was heard in its West Coast premiere. Holliger blew blithely through its busy accumulations of notes, working most effectively in the more overtly jazzy moments of parody. Salonen conducted the 13 supporting instrumentalists in a brisk, seemingly clarified performance of this mostly undistinguished, almost regressively modern material.