Searching for Eclecticism? Mysticism? Try Hovhaness

In today’s never-ending search for a new, improved, expanded classical audience, the searchers could do worse than examine the music of Alan Hovhaness, the American composer living happily in Seattle and still productive at age 82.

In works bearing such evocative titles as “Mountains and Rivers Without End,” “Celestial Gate,” “Vishnu” and “The Mysterious Mountain,” Hovhaness has for half a century been purveying a heterogeneous style that utilizes the Western orchestra to tell stories inspired by elements from Armenian, East Indian and other Oriental sources and European medieval church modes, often wrapped in Baroque stylistic procedures.

You want eclectic? You’ve got it. You want multicultural? Mysticism? In touch with nature? Hovhaness is your man. And you can have an awfully good time while imbibing the unself-consciously culturally correct messages he has been sending out for decades.

Hovhaness’ emphatically tonal music pretty much dispenses with thematic development, yet it is thematically rich. And while hardly favoring rhythmic status, he does like stretches of unvarying rhythm, energized by changing sonorities and tempo changes.

If this sounds like some sort of Minimalism--and indeed in the early days of that movement, its prominent practitioners acknowledged Hovhaness’ influence--so be it. But the Hovhaness style is devoid both of Philip Glass’ catatonic sameness and John Adams’ hyperactive Minimalism, if that oxymoron can be tolerated.

These reflections are a consequence of listening to what the staggeringly prolific Hovhaness conservatively labels his 50th surviving symphony and his Opus 360: the “Mount St. Helens” Symphony, written in 1983, three years after the Washington volcano’s cataclysmic eruption. The recorded premiere has Gerard Schwarz conducting the Seattle Symphony (Delos 3137).

The symphony’s three-movement plan starts with typically Hovhanessian contemplation, Eastern in tonality, with a hint of Copland’s wide-open spaces and projected via a Bach-like fugal format.

Movement two, “Spirit Lake,” intensifies the Oriental feeling, with its tinkling bells and dreamy (Hovhaness’ dreams are, however, subtly controlled) meanderings.

For most listeners, however, the lengthy finale is what the symphony will be about. Here, the titular mountain, after being viewed (or heard) through a tense, dawn-evoking hymn, blows its top in an orgy of percussive fury, interlaced with horrific trombone glissandos and frenzied string scamperings, segueing into a riotous Eastern shimmy--the belly dance of nature?--for virtuoso brass and percussion.

It’s wonderfully natural, even simple-sounding, music--but set on a foundation of vast skill in manipulating the orchestra and formal savvy. That post-eruption section is, in fact, a multiple-voiced triple canon and what follows, the return of the movement’s opening “dawn” theme, stripped of its portentousness, is another exhilarating fugue.

The “Mount St. Helens” performance by Schwarz and his Seattle ensemble--our most dedicated and persuasive practitioners of tonal Americana--is superbly alert and colorful, and the Delos recording reproduces with stunning immediacy not only the volcanic cacophony but the string sweetness in which the work abounds.

The coupling, this time with the composer himself conducting Schwarz’s orchestra, is Hovhaness’ nominal Symphony No. 22, “Symphony of Light” (1971). It sounds rather like a warm-up for “Mount St. Helens,” but in an even more contemplative mood and not without its seductive charms.

P.S. For those whose fascination with Philip Glass remains, be advised that his 1989 “Itaipu” (something to do with a hydro-electric dam on the Amazon) and the previous year’s “The Canyon” (about a canyon) have both been recorded for the first time, by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Robert Shaw (Sony 46352). You’ve heard it all before, but under different names.