East Meets West in Tan Dun’s Winning Way

“Did you see the sound?”

Tan Dun, the 39-year-old composer from China, is standing, facing an eager audience. His mouth is wide open as if with amazement. His eyes glisten. His hands shape the air with the elegance of a Stokowski. And we respond with our collective breath, an aspirated sound of “haaa” that he asks us to contribute and that creates the illusion that Japan America Theatre has become a living, breathing organism.

Tan understands the theatrical nature of making music probably better than any composer since John Cage, whom he likes to credit as a mentor. So much a charmer--he knows all the right moves, as one insider put it--Tan has become a darling of the international festival circuit and generates a certain suspicion among musicians and composers because of that success.

But it takes a special talent to woo and win over both audience and musicians of the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group as easily as Tan did Monday for the first concert of the Green Umbrella. Conducting a program he called “An Evening of Spiritual Journeys,” Tan looked east and west but not necessarily at the places in the East and West one might expect.

For instance, one pilgrimage was that of young German composer Gerhard Stabler, who went to San Francisco looking for the spiritual remnants of the Beats and instead found noisy garbage trucks waking him up in the wee hours of the morning, which he then immortalized in “Den Mullfahrern von San Francisco” (To the Garbagemen of San Francisco).

Tan also explored his precedents. Stravinsky peered east early in the century in his prickly “Three Japanese Lyrics” (securely sung by soprano Elissa Johnston). Later Toru Takemitsu gazed at the West from his Japanese garden in works like the sumptuously delicate “Water-ways.” Even young Scottish composer James MacMillan, who likes to evoke the ritual of the Catholic Church, has been lured eastward from time to time, turning to Javanese gong sounds in his “Three Dawn Rituals.”

Tan’s conducting of all these works was vivid. He has a solid, if unremarkable, sense of rhythm, shape and phrase. But he brings a feeling for sound, for its color and texture, that somehow makes this music sound completely fresh and new. And that, of course, is what he has mastered particularly well in his own works.

His two contributions to the program were Concerto for Pizzicato Piano and Ten Instruments, from 1995, and “Circle, With Four Trios, Conductor and Audience,” from 1992. Tan had conducted both of these works last summer with the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society as part of Lincoln Center Festival ’96 to acclaim. The performances by the New Music Group here were far better.

In “Circle”--the work with audience aahing and oohing (one of the sounds he asks for is a tsking noise that he described as the sound we tend to make both when we find something incredibly delicious and when we are disapproving)--the music, played by trios spread around the hall, seems never to touch ground, to have any focus until the end when the players sing a faint melody.

But Tan has slowed down the piece considerably over the years, and its theatrical impact is now greatly enhanced. And the audience has such a good time participating and watching Tan’s engrossing conducting style that it all seems like a mystical moment.

The Concerto also employs a circle; here the 10 instruments surround the piano. Pizzicato piano means that the soloist often plucks the strings inside the instrument, and the whole piece is one of variously delicate and exciting special effects.

The soloist was Stephen Clarke, a Canadian pianist who seemed like a tense spring bouncing from keyboard to strings. I’ve liked the piece better when played by the more rarefied and eloquent pianist Margaret Leng Tan, for whom it was written. But the performance was irresistible nonetheless, as is always Tan’s way.