MUSIC REVIEW : Knussen Leads New Music Under the Green Umbrella

Something slightly unusual--and unusually refreshing--transpired Monday night in the Japan America Theatre, at the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group’s Green Umbrella concert. The group dared to give a new music concert sans that familiar staple of such events--the world premiere.

In fact, the repertory ushered in by guest conductor and contemporary music specialist Oliver Knussen took a long, measured view of the meaning of new music. Along with the consummate new music-inclined soprano Lucy Shelton and the devoted musicians in this special branch of the Philharmonic, Knussen opened ears and invited insights.

Anchoring the program was the profound and compact Five Pieces for Orchestra by Anton Webern, circa 1911-1913. Brevity is the soul of the poetry in this masterful, microscopic work, its smatterings of notes assembled with both delicacy and volatility. Knussen and company gave a lucid reading, and played it twice for good measure.

If Webern made the strongest impact, most of the program was devoted to music of Scottish origin, mainly that of Peter Maxwell Davies. In his 1965 work “Seven in nomine,” the genre-lacing Davies leaps unabashedly from the 16th Century to the 20th, between rearranged Renaissance models and his own thornier tonalities.

Glasgow-born and London-based Knussen’s own small but intense “Trumpets” of 1975 found the limber Shelton laying contoured shards of text over a bed of antic, chattering clarinets, and tracing a jagged arc from wistfulness to alarm.

Davies’ “Revelation and Fall,” composed in 1965 and revised in 1980, consumed the concert’s second half and proved a worthy showcase for Shelton’s considerable range and restraint. Over a mood-swinging, expressionistic canvas, Shelton navigated a gamut of vocal effects and role-playing, shifting, at one point, from a mysterious, wash-of-sound passage to some old-fashioned shrieking through a megaphone. It was that kind of night.