MUSIC & DANCE REVIEWS : Festival Begins With a Sound Obsession

Experimentation with instrumental sound provided a strong thread of thematic continuity at the first of three concerts in the International New Music Festival at the L.A. County Museum of Art Monday. In this usually provocative and often moving program, common instrumental practices did not necessarily apply, extended techniques were the norm, and the paradox of real vs. simulated instrumental textures reared its head more than once.

If the atonal vocabulary in Robert Hall Lewis’ “Osservazioni I” is familiar, the sonic surfaces are less so. Amy Knoles’ tubular bells and tympani assumed a frontal role, while pianist Delores Stevens often manipulated the strings with hands inside the piano.

Despite its hushed, pin-drop subtlety, Josh Levine’s “Downstream” was perhaps the strongest work of the evening. Trickling abstract minutiae from the Swedish Magnus Andersson’s guitar, in dialogue with guitaristic computer-generated materials, demanded close scrutiny and rewarded the listener with an eerie delicacy.

Man/machine interaction takes a whimsical turn in Dorrance Stalvey’s “Togethers III,” in which clarinetist Marty Walker moved gradually across a stage lined with music stands, meanwhile articulating machine-like linear cascades off a mirror-image taped source.

Italian double bassist Stefano Scodanibbio also danced along the outer limits of orthodoxy. In his “Doppelselbstbildnis,” he coaxed ghostly high-register tones over the ensemble’s microtonal swirl. German composer Helmut Lachenmann’s “Pression”) found the bassist, playing solo and as soft as a gentle, pollen-laden breeze, bowing and handling the bass every which way but traditionally.

Ironically, the one anomaly on the program was Aurelio de la Vega’s 1957 String Quartet in Five Movements (In Memoriam Alban Berg), performed with focus by the Cuarteto Latinoamericano from Mexico. After an evening of delightful deviations, it was almost disorienting to watch musicians playing straight, in the 12-tone language--by now, the old comfy chair of 20th-Century musical thought.

It was also one of the pieces with an identifiably international stamp, as a clear link to Berg’s arid lyricism melded with a quality of Latin bravado.