Xtet Delves Into Life, Death and ‘Elvis’

John Steinmetz takes the cheesy art of Elvis imitation to a ridiculous new low. The wig looks like a hooker’s reject. The horrid white outfit would disgrace a thrift shop. The red scarf is way over the top. The shoes are dirty Adidas sneakers, for goodness sake. And he plays a bassoon!

But then this seems just what Michael Daugherty calls for in his wickedly hilarious short chamber piece “Dead Elvis,” which concluded Xtet’s appearance Monday night at the Leo S. Bing Theater of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Daugherty has been making a name for himself in modern music by inviting characters from popular culture into an art that normally does not want to associate with them. He has written a Superman symphony of near Brucknerian scope (it will be available soon on an Argo CD). He has investigated J. Edgar Hoover with the help of the Kronos Quartet. And Jackie O. is the subject for his new opera in Houston next year.

Elvis is, for better or worse, a part of American culture, the composer writes in his program note, and sooner or later we’ve got to deal with him. Daugherty, a composer at the University of Michigan, deals with him brutally but also affectionately in what turns out to be a mad fantasy on the familiar medieval Dies Irae theme. It inspires audience groans and laughter in almost equal measure, but behind the silliness is exciting music and poignancy.

The poignancy stood out particularly on this occasion. Xtet, the ensemble that brings together first-rate players from various other local groups, cannily made an evening of new, and not-so-new, music that dealt with life and death in striking and surprising ways. The most striking, and a 180-degree turn from Daugherty, is Chinary Ung’s “ . . . Still Life After Death.”

A Cambodian based at the University of California, San Diego, Ung is a mesmerizing composer who never seems to run out of astonishing ways to translate the sound and sense of his native culture into Western forms. In this example from last year, he employs an amplified soprano, a bass chanting in the Buddhist manner of producing otherworldly overtones and a chamber ensemble to reveal that moment known to Buddhists when death can be accepted as a calming of the soul. This is not an emotion we in the West easily experience, and the fact that an eight-minute piece of music can make a Western listener receptive to it is a major accomplishment.

Elsewhere, Xtet surveyed a 23-minute piano quartet, “King of the Sun,” by USC composer Stephen Hartke in which paintings by Miro served as inspiration for musical wanderings between medieval music and today. A piece by Glenn Hackbarth mirrored Ung’s acquired stillness, although in Hackbarth’s more conventional “Passage” it is a tape, along with piano and percussion, that is needed to achieve the cosmic drone.

Finally, there was Martinu’s “La Revue de Cuisine,” one of those sassy pieces that young composers in Paris in the ‘20s loved to make, appropriating jazz in pretty much the same spirit that Daugherty appropriates pop culture.

All of the performances were tight and played with convincing (and in the case of Steinmetz’s solo turn, daredevil) conviction. It was also fascinating to witness how easily and sexily the ensemble could enter into the Tango movement of the Martinu, yet sound labored in the Charleston that followed. The reason was simple: Tangos have flourished and are still part of our music, whereas the Charleston is history.

And on this program Xtet clearly had placed its priority on music that represents life as we live it, even when it concerns the dead.