Ensemble Modern Hails West Coast Works

This review was supposed to be a preview. Frankfurt’s esteemed Ensemble Modern meant to include Los Angeles in its first American tour, but a funding emergency forced the EM to cancel those dates.

One look at the stage of Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, where it did perform Saturday night, revealed why. What other ensemble would even consider carting around a gigantic tam-tam meant to be hit just once?

It brought that tam-tam, however impractical, because a Frank Zappa work required it. It brought it because the EM players wanted to show Americans their devotion to our music--the program was mainly American, with John Adams conducting. And it brought it, along with a truckload of other equipment, some 20 players and assorted technicians, because it is, perhaps, a little naive about the costs involved here.

But West Coast presenters and German sponsors (who balked at the $85,000 needed to continue on to the West Coast) may also have been naive. If the cheering, whooping standing ovation that greeted this concert is any indication, the EM proved a goodwill band. And, ironically, the goodwill reaped was for West Coast music. The evening was also Adams’ greatest New York triumph.

Much of that triumph lay in the sheer persuasiveness of the ensemble’s performances and Adams’ conducting. The players dress casually but well (in black but with splotches of color), and they seem to play the same way. I have never seen a performance of the player piano studies (5, 6 and 7) by Conlon Nancarrow (not meant for human fingers but spectacularly orchestrated by Yvar Mikhashoff anyway) performed before without seeing terror in the musicians’ eyes. I have never witnessed Adams’ almost-as-difficult Chamber Concerto played with such ease.

And Zappa--who arranged some of his works as an evening-length show for the EM shortly before he died--simply could not get over how the band gobbled up his most unplayable music and came back for more. Three Zappa selections--”The Girl in the Magnesium Dress,” “Get Whitey” and “G-Spot-Tornado”--ended the program, which also included Varese’s “Octandre” from 1930 and new works by Adams and the German composer Wolfgang Rihm.

It was, moreover, a program with something to say about our music at the end of a combative century. Zappa, for instance, found a stylistic soft spot where Varese’s brazen gestures and the Mothers of Invention’s sophomoric sound effects could actually relate. Adams’ music was also inclusive, arguing for the present, where post-romantic angst, sunny minimalism and popular musics needn’t war. In the Chamber Concerto, Adams explains, Roadrunner cartoons meet early Schoenberg.

Adams’ new piece, “Scratchband” (commissioned by Betty Freeman), attempts further synthesis. It is complex music that also wants to boogie--but gingerly. Adams has stepped back from the pop music of last year’s “I Was Looking at the Ceiling, and Then I Saw the Sky,” and now seems to be working on a new, integrated style, falling back on some of his minimalist tendencies in a 12-minute piece that is perfectly engaging if slightly innocuous.

Which leaves the token German. Rihm’s new “Gejagte Form” (Hunted Form) is a furious piece, full of explosive outbursts. It is the music of a really fine composer still fighting old battles between the European modernist tradition and the postmodern present, the very battle the West Coast long ago fought. Perhaps if the Germans can’t afford to send the EM to California, they could at least put Rihm on a plane for a visit.