MUSIC REVIEWS : Composers Brown, Riley Attend EAR Unit Premieres

The rewards for venturing out on a rainy night can be many, and so they were Wednesday, when the California EAR Unit gave a program of premieres on its series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Of the four living composers represented, two of them, Earle Brown and Terry Riley, were on hand for this festive, well-attended occasion.

More impressive, however, were the two new and provocative works--Brown’s an L.A. premiere, Riley’s the first performance anywhere--being heard. Each one seems to be, for its creator, a return to an earlier aesthetic, after some well-documented compositional detours.

Conducting his own, quarter-hour “Tracking Pierrot”--which program notes from the composer say is “an homage” to the writing skills of Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire”--Brown led six members of the EAR Unit through an intriguing, if often low-key, excursion into a world of night-music in a post-serial accent.

Only infrequently utilizing raised voices and violent movement, this piece remains mostly quiet, gentle and understated, well-placed silences punctuating its mystery. It presents again an old paradox: When dynamics are restrained, and seldom reach even medium-loudness, the result is more, not less, resonance.

Brown’s incisive leadership and what seemed thorough preparation from the sextet--Gloria Cheng, piano; Amy Knoles, percussion; Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, cello; Robin Lorentz, violin; James Rohrig, clarinets, and Dorothy Stone, flutes--produced a haunting first performance.

Riley’s brand-new, 40-minute “Four Woelfli Portraits,” using the composer as narrator in the first, and projections of graphic works by Woelfli with each movement, would seem to mark the 57-year-old composer’s return to a mainstream tonal style.

The outer movements, titled “Fountain March No. 49” and “Lysol Apes Polka,” respectively, are brief, amusing and frame more serious musical business: the central, jazz-derived, post-Dixieland “Central Star March” and the also jazzy and lengthy--it occupies more than half of the entire piece, timewise--”Violoncellist of Salamanca.”

This multi-part third movement includes solos by each of the seven instrumentalists--percussionist Arthur Jarvinen and the six above-mentioned players. It moves, in rhythms of the dance-hall, over a musical terrain of some complexity but few contradictions.

Usually, it entertains; sometimes, it disturbs. At all moments, it engages the listener. The ensemble, conducted pointedly by Rand Steiger, gave the new work an impassioned, energetic reading. The program began with Andrew Rindfleisch’s often obsessive and hyperkinetic, in other moments brooding, “Fanatical Dances,” conducted by Steiger and played by the seven-member band with reliable panache. Then followed Elliott Carter’s “Con Leggerezza Pensosa,” an aggressive, four-minute nocturne for violin, clarinet and cello, nicely limned by Lorentz, Rohrig and Duke-Kirkpatrick.