‘Polynesia Alive!’ Concert Provides Too Much Diversity

For the generous crowd that mounted the steps to Ventura City Hall last Sunday for the “Polynesia Alive!” concert, a sense of cultural whiplash was a real potential hazard. It was a bumpy ride. There was the elegance of Lou Harrison’s Suite for Piano, Violin and Small Orchestra, but also a Polynesian drum and dance troupe more entertaining than enlightening, an all-too-brief serving of Olivier Messiaen’s piano music and Francis Poulenc’s tongue-in-cheeky art songs. Some listeners left with mental bruises.

This is not to say that the performance lacked in worthwhile music. There was plenty to admire, but a surer sense of balance would have helped hold things together.

You could say that eclecticism, at least in some degree, comes with the territory. The “Musics Alive!” series, funded in part by the Barbara Barnard Smith Fund for World Musics and presented by the New West Symphony, remains one of the more engaging musical entities on the Ventura County calendar. Its mandate, from the beginning, has been to bridge the ostensible gap between world music and the work of living composers, who have often drawn on world music as inspiration.

This time out, though, coherence of programming was not in the house. The program had changed from the original plan, which would have included performances of Ravel’s “Chansons madecasses” and Leonard Bernstein’s “Trouble in Tahiti.”

With the showcasing of Harrison’s suite, a performance of actual gamelan music would have made for a more logical complement than the Los Angeles-based Nonosina Polynesian Ensemble, which, with all due respects to their gifts, seemed out of place in this sometimes-cerebral context.

Harrison’s Suite, brought back to public life with a recording by Keith Jarrett in 1988, is an enthralling piece of music with an effective west-to-east ratio of musical materials. The work’s essence is somehow at once bracing and tranquil, in ways characteristic of the best minimalist music. That fact is especially remarkable considering that it was written in 1951, before the idea of minimalist process was a gleam in the general compositional eye.

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With a compact “orchestra” led by Boris Brott and featuring Gloria Cheng on piano and Paul Shure on violin this was a sharp reading, the contours of which were diffused only by the cavernous acoustic in the high-ceiling of the City Hall atrium.

Harrison, as spry a 79-year-old composer as you’re likely to meet, was on hand for a Q&A; session. He spoke about the rationale behind the two movements in the suite titled First and Second Gamelans. In these movements, he was drawing on “memories of hearing gamelan in San Francisco and on recordings.” Later, he would develop more and more deliberate Indonesian-oriented music.

We could have used much more of the glorious pianism of Cheng, who performed two brief pieces by the late French composer Messiaen to open the concert’s second half. Cheng, one of the West Coast’s bright lights, particularly in new music circles, recently released a formidable CD of Messiaen piano music on the Koch label.

At City Hall, she brought her usual sensitivity and moxie to “Ile de Feu” I and II from the “Quatre Etudes de Rhythme,” tour de force pieces that demand digital fortitude and brute concentration.

Swerving radically to another mode of French music, baritone James Kenney gave an impressive and charismatic reading of Poulenc’s 1932 “Le bal masque,” which he also recently performed as part of the Ojai Camerata’s season. Smirking whimsy and surreal tale-spinning were tempered by a knowing musicality--a balance etched in Kenney’s treatment.

This was all well and good, and well-played, but the question of continuity began to nag. Poulenc’s cafe-minded urbanity and high-brow cabaret schtickiness seemed a world away from Harrison’s time-expansive, transcendental musings. And wither Polynesia?

Let’s just say that the world of music was nicely represented at City Hall, in sublime and garish and multicultural, multi-temperamental ways.