New Music Group Essays European Works

Under the Green Umbrella Monday night at the Japan America Theatre, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new music series focused on European composers who are making a difference. Between music of two seventysomething composers--German Hans Werner Henze and Hungarian Gyorgy Kurtag, both established individualistic masters--and twentysomething composer-pianist Thomas Ades, the results were generally inspiring, with ample help from the New Music Group’s concerted efforts.

Ades’ “Living Toys” is a quirky, childlike invention for a medium-sized ensemble that maintains just enough tension, in terms of intonation, rhythmic cohesion and tonality, to keep us guessing and entertained. It bears traces of an actual sense of humor, not just the usual postmodern, ironic smirk.

Ades took to the piano for the U.S. premiere of his solo piece “Traced Overhead,” which may have been the evening’s highlight, or at least its high point of poignancy. An ethereal work bearing influences of Ligeti and Conlon Nancarrow, it proceeds with a kind of deconstructed romanticism, no less moving for its cerebral schemes, and gives the sensation of floating slowly downward into sleep or, perhaps, an abyss.

Thinking like a miniaturist and a sound poet comes naturally for Kurtag, who, for all his acclaim, remains one of the underrated composers of the day. His “Hommage a R. Sch.,” played sharply by Ades on piano, clarinetist Lorin Levee and violist John Hayhurst, is a waste-not-want-not suite, built from tiny movements full of action and intrigue.

Kurtag’s “Grabstein fur Stephan” presented here in its U.S. premiere, is something else again, an evocative piece that veers from gentle open guitar strings to chordal breezes and bracing howls of rhythmically triggered air horns. Conductor Markus Stenz deigned it proper to play the piece twice, for good measure and good reason.

A work ahead of its time, Henze’s “Kammermusik 1958” consumed the concert’s second half with its rich, somber reflections, featuring the commanding tenor Jon Garrison. Tenderness came in the solo guitar sections, neatly etched by David Tanenbaum. Famed tenor Peter Pears and guitarist Julian Bream were on hand for the premiere, in the year of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s birth, yet, today, it sounds freshly hatched.