Knussen Leads Tribute to Two Shapers of Modern Age

A great theme of the music of this century--and the one that may concern us the most at its end--is that musical works can provide models for society. As the result of technology, every composer now lives all the time with music of every age, every culture, every colleague. And as composers have become global travelers, their music has increasingly sought structures or systems that help different cultures get along.

Or to put it as Oliver Knussen, the British composer and conductor, did Monday night, when he introduced this season’s Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group Green Umbrella series at the Japan America Theatre: “It is no bad thing for people to be intelligently synthetic.”

That means the Green Umbrella can be a wide umbrella. The program ostensibly served many functions. It paid tribute to Japan’s greatest modern age composer, Toru Takemitsu, who died last year, and to a hermetic maker of modern music for player piano in Mexico, Conlon Nancarrow, who died last summer.

It included works by Knussen and Peter Maxwell Davies that were slightly mad chimeras of medieval music, which so haunts composers with a British music education. And it concluded with a local introduction to a young English composer, Julian Anderson, whose “Khorovod” begins with a Lithuanian dance heard in something like 10 different speeds at once and only gets dizzier as it goes along.

Nutty as it all sounds, the program made illuminating, exhilarating and touching sense--touching most of all in the Takemitsu, who served as the emblem of the concert and whose music will also be heard at the Philharmonic this week and in a tribute to be given by the Concordia Orchestra at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium on Monday.

Takemitsu’s early fame came from being the first composer to successfully and profoundly combine traditional Japanese music with the Western avant-garde. But it turns out that that only scratches the surface of this man of exquisite taste, as Knussen called him.

Takemitsu called himself a gardener of time, and his remarkable music, so pure and delicate and seeming to breathe a rarefied air, is actually the result of a composer who adored with equal passion Debussy, big-band jazz and Bach, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the trashiest sci-fi films of the ‘50s.

This is a composer who could write gaudy pop music, as he did with delicious relish for some films, and who could write the stunning “Archipelago S.” in 1993 for Knussen and heard here for the first time on the West Coast. Dividing a large ensemble into three groups onstage and placing clarinetists on either side of the balcony, Takemitsu was thinking simultaneously of Stockholm, Seattle and the islands of Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, as probably only he would.

Incredibly beautiful, lush textures of sound, fragments of melody that seem to be in the eternal process of becoming phrases but never actually arriving, enveloped the hall. Very different was “Air,” for solo flute, Takemitsu’s last completed piece, written not long before his death in 1996. The fragmentary nature of the music is greater, and it is painfully moving to hear.

Connections throughout this clever program were everywhere. Knussen’s “Two Organa”--sophisticated, intricate and highly engaging brief inventions on pseudo-chant--had its inspiration in a commission for a piece for music box, the technological forerunner of Nancarrow’s player piano. Moreover, while Nancarrow’s Prelude and Blues, for solo piano, and Toccata, for violin and piano, all written in 1935, predate his player piano pieces, they demonstrate nonetheless the same obsession with Bach, jazz and modern rhythm that Nancarrow made transcendental on the mechanical instrument.

Davies’ “Antechrist,” a bizarre and irreverent romp on medieval music that opened the program, was written in 1967 and very much a product of its time and place in swinging London. That was also the year Anderson was born, and his “Khorovod,” though not quite so demented as the Davies, seems as if it too were born of that age, when complexity and a bit of madness were all the rage.

But the real key to all this music is not its cleverness but its brilliance, and Knussen led performances that captured that brilliance in a fashion that I cannot imagine any other group of traditional orchestra players equaling. Pianist Gloria Cheng-Cochran and violinist Camille Avellano were the superhuman soloists in the Nancarrow; Catherine Ransom, the superb flutist for Takemitsu’s “Air.”

* Oliver Knussen conducts the full Los Angeles Philharmonic, Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m., and Sunday, 2:30 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., $6-$63, (213) 850-2000.