MUSIC REVIEW : Reynolds’ Lofty ‘last things’ a Poetically Charged Evening

Barely two dozen listeners bore witness to the performance of Roger Reynolds’ “last things, I think, to think about,” part of the Monday Evening Concerts series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But, as anyone familiar with new music-going knows, audience count and cultural merit are not necessarily interrelated.

Granted, the work might seem esoteric on paper--an hourlong work for voice and piano, with computerized sprinklings, based on the poetry of John Ashberry, whose work gives linearity a run for its money. But the results were engaging, even entertaining. Reynolds, the UC San Diego faculty member whose earlier Ashberry-inspired piece “Whispers Out of Time” earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1989, has created a rich and deceptively lean work deeply respectful of its textual source.

Bass baritone Philip Larson intoned proper austerity and authority, floating and sometimes speaking his lines, a la sprechstimme , over the independently expressive, post-serial activity of pianist Aleck Karis. Extra-musical elements include the poet’s own narration, and the visual cartography of projected words.

In “Hotel Lautreamont,” one of the many settings in the piece, abrupt computerized tones sputtered out of the speakers and the sonic construction grew more elaborate, in keeping with the increasingly abstract syntax of the text. “The world as we know it sinks into dementia, proving narrative passe,” Larson intoned, tellingly.

Reynolds’ take on Ashberry basks in the poetic reconfiguring of the real world, a world of urban grit and consequences, where abstraction rules over reason. Music and text get along famously.