O.C. Music : Minimalism’s Maximum Power : Composer of ‘The Piano’ Is Coming to Costa Mesa

In the days before the first American appearances by his 17-year-old Michael Nyman Band, the composer of the music from “The Piano” was rummaging through his cellar in London and turned up some interesting things.

One is the program for his own first U.S. gig, at the Kitchen in New York City in 1980, not with the band but with American sidemen. Nyman also has found his note-filled copy of Peter Greenaway’s screenplay for “The Draughtsman’s Contract” (1983), a film for which he wrote the score and which catapulted both him and Greenaway to a level of international fame neither had imagined.

“We certainly didn’t expect the film to have the impact that it did,” Nyman said on the phone from his home. “I know he was surprised, and I was. You think that after one success you become streetwise and cynical. Yet again, I didn’t expect that the music for ‘The Piano’ would have the impact it did.”

That film’s soundtrack recording held the top spot on the classical crossover charts for six months. “I didn’t write it with a view of making any sort of ‘popular’ impact,” Nyman said. “Sounds bizarre, but that’s the case.”

The programs he has selected for his tour with the band--which stops at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Thursday--represent still more rummaging of a sort: They cover the range of his composing career from “The Draughtsman’s Contract” and his never-recorded “The Fall of Icarus” to a concert suite based on music written for “The Piano,” to be augmented in Costa Mesa by members of the Pacific Symphony.

The programs will vary from venue to venue during the band’s dizzying 16-day, 14-city trek, a breakthrough for Nyman generated by the hot “Piano” soundtrack. The pieces to be played in Segerstrom Hall will afford an overview of nine years of his work--some of the world’s most dynamic, iconoclastic music-making.

Reviewing “The Piano” soundtrack in the New York Times, K. Robert Schwarz said, “It has always seemed surprising that Nyman has not achieved the popularity in the United States that his near-contemporary and stylistic peer Philip Glass has.”

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But though Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams and other American composers led the charge in the ‘70s for the style called Minimalism (a term, ironically enough, coined by Nyman, in his former life as a music critic), a consensus is emerging that the Nyman Band delivers the most powerful concerts of Minimalist-inspired music anywhere. (Nyman himself now avoids the Minimalist label.)

“Everyone who only knows the band from recordings is overwhelmed by the impact of the band live,” Nyman said with pride.

Perhaps the only ways to prepare are with the live recording of the band in Tokyo (“The Essential Michael Nyman Band,” Argo Records), which suggests the superhuman, propulsive, raucous nature of the music, and the newer “Michael Nyman Live” album (Virgin), recorded in Spain in May with the same nine- member band that is coming to Orange County. (A 14-member group also tours).

With the addition of such virtuosi as John Harle on sax (“the most important classical soprano sax player in the world,” Nyman calls him), Andrew Findon on baritone sax and Kate Musker on viola, Nyman (who always conducts from the piano) and company have come a long way from their genesis in 1977 as an accompanying ensemble for a National Theatre production of Carlo Goldoni’s “Il Campiello.”

What started as musicological research for Nyman’s composer friend and National Theatre music director Sir Harrison Birtwistle turned into a “kind of street band that didn’t exist in Venice in the 18th Century,” Nyman said. “So I just used my imagination. We made the group sound as raw and rough and loud as possible without amplification, and combined diverse instruments from completely different periods--Medieval-era rebecs and 20th-Century saxophones.

“Here was this fantastic sound unlike any other, and I felt rather sad that it would end when the production did. I don’t know why or when I was forcibly struck by the idea that this group should stay together.

“I realized that we had no original material. So, of necessity, I became a composer. One of these early pieces, ‘In Re Don Giovanni,’ is a sort of paradigm of what I’ve done since. It became a model for rhythmic patterns, for an energy level, and a way of framing classical music in a 20th-Century context. It’s exciting to have it on the new ‘Live’ album.”

Nyman said Greenaway recognized “quite generously and honestly that that piece showed how it was possible to make something simultaneously period music but with late 20th-Century ideas and aesthetics.”

The piece thus informed the music for “The Draughtsman’s Contract” and led to a tight filmmaker-composer collaboration similar only to that of Federico Fellini and Nino Rota. Thursday’s concert will include pieces not only from “Draughtsman” but from Greenaway’s “A Zed and Two Noughts” and “Water Dances,” adapted from Greenaway’s short “Making a Splash.”

The union broke somewhat bitterly after “Prospero’s Books” (1991) which, though it provided Nyman with a chance to write a kind of mini-opera, also included music that Nyman said he didn’t approve. He and Greenaway have not spoken since. While Greenaway embarked on opera and film collaborations with Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, Nyman went onto “The Piano,” Diane Kurys’ “Seven Days, Seven Nights” and the upcoming “Mesmer” starring Alan Rickman.

Film scoring actually is a small part of Nyman’s life, which he is devoting more and more to opera (his chamber opera “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” is available on a CBS recording) and small ensemble and solo settings, such as his recent “Songbooks” recording (Argo) with Ute Lemper.

Even though he is one of Europe’s most in-demand composers--a typical project is “Musique a Grand Vitesse (MGV),” commissioned by the French railway system to celebrate the opening of the Paris-to-Lille high-speed train--Nyman remains controversial in England, where conservative critics regularly lambaste the band’s amplified concerts. Barry Millington of the London Times has dismissed Nyman’s work as “sewing-machine music elevated to an art form.”

“They are behind the times,” Nyman said, “and, on the other hand, they go to one of my concerts, hate the amplification, then go home and listen to a Mozart piano concerto, which is of course amplified on their CD players. So their distinction is totally phony.”

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Besides, Nyman said, there is a practical reason for amplifying the band: “At a certain point, I found that the old Campiello Band’s ancient music instruments weren’t able to play the music I was writing, so they faded out of the group in much the same way as they originally faded out of Western music culture. I added a bass guitar and electric guitar simultaneously, adding a total propulsive attack.

“With the electric guitar being amplified, all the other instruments had to be amplified. I’m very much a child of John Cage and his notions of chance in music, and all of the things which have happened in the band have come about through chance and organic development. I never sat down and thought, ‘Well, in order to put this music over, we have to be amplified.’ ”

Just as he chafed at being ignored by the motion picture academy for his “Piano” score, he senses that some, in the music Establishment and audiences alike, sense that the “Nyman sound” is fundamentally simple repetitions of dramatic chords.

“The music, looks simple on the page,” he acknowledged. “But in order to get the style right and keep it going for an entire concert, you have to be a virtuoso musician. “Andy Findon, for instance, may play the baritone sax for an hour straight, then pick up the piccolo and play it with equal virtuosity. The energy these players have to put out is not just like sitting down with a few programmed keyboards and letting them do the work. My players are pumping out constant jaw-breaking and arm-breaking energy, which is very much what the music is all about.”

* The Michael Nyman Band plays Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive., Costa Mesa. $18 to $30. (714) 556-2121.