Philharmonic’s New Music Program Balanced, Timely

It was heartening to see a nearly full house gathered under the Green Umbrella at the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new music series opener Monday night in the Japan America Theatre. It was even more heartening to hear a program this balanced, neatly framed, well-played and even timely--two of the composers were African American, in honor of Martin Luther King Day.

Led by Esa-Pekka Salonen, the concert served as a reasonable role model for effective new music packaging. Included were two works by 20th century icon Luciano Berio, now 70, an example of sensuous Finnish Minimalism from Salonen’s contemporary Magnus Lindberg and an ear-opening piece by composer Gerard Grisey. (Grisey’s “L’Icone Paradoxale” will receive its world premiere by the full L.A. Philharmonic this week.)

David Stoley’s world premiere was an arrangement--a reconstruction rather than a deconstruction--of Medieval composer Guillaume de Machaut’s “Hoquetus David.” With its reshuffled rhythmic units, the striking work, well-rendered by a dozen players (including one on electric guitar), presents early music through a prism of contemporary rethink.

Jeffrey Mumford’s “two miniatures for violin and piano,” gracefully performed by Elizabeth Baker and Grant Gershon, respectively, echoes the abstract lyricism and dialogue of Elliott Carter, one of Mumford’s teachers. Impressionistic tone-painting is more the gist of Mumford’s “a pond within the drifting dusk,” played with an ethereal poise by alto flutist Anne Diener, cellist Howard Colf and harpist Lou Anne Neill.

Diener and clarinetist Lorin Levee gave masterly readings on two of Berio’s formidable “Sequenza” series, meaningfully virtuosic solo pieces that are now furtive, now languid.

Grisey’s powerful “Talea,” written in 1986 for a five-piece ensemble, is a persuasive example of musique spectrale, based on overtones and juxtapositions of opposites--consonance meets dissonance, rhythmic density meets silence, with some microtonal detours around the standard Western scale. Bright flurries of notes erupt out of a bed of soft long tones, and styles are bridged without post-modern flippancy. This is music both coolly objective and visceral, brimming with intrigue.

Closing the concert, Lindberg’s “Corrente,” heard in its West Coast premiere, reflects well on the tougher-minded European strain of Minimalism; it’s music more about exploration than navel-gazing. Seventeen players--the largest ensemble of the evening--tautly navigated scalar bits and runs assembled in shifting relationships.

In all, Monday was a good news day for new music in the Southland.