Taking the Critical Second Step

Difficult as it is, getting a premiere is not the hardest step on the road to repertory for a new piece of music; it’s getting on the next program and the one after that, acquiring critical mass in the consciousness of the musical world.

The Long Beach Symphony, however, has developed a commissioning project that may ease the path to wider performances for new works, like Lowell Liebermann’s “Loss of Breath,” which Long Beach music director JoAnn Falletta and the orchestra will premiere on Saturday.

The idea, which began taking shape years ago when Falletta was music director of the Women’s Philharmonic in San Francisco, was to form a consortium of orchestras, each of which would commission and premiere a work by an American composer and would also commit to performing one of the other orchestras’ commissioned pieces.

“We did a lot of premieres in San Francisco,” Falletta says, “but whether it was the first performance or not didn’t matter. I had the feeling that we were creating repertory, pieces that were going to become part of orchestral life.”

The Long Beach Symphony found funding for the project from five public and private foundations, but finding consortium partners proved harder than expected.

Not all music directors or orchestras share Falletta’s passion for new repertory, particularly when it means committing not just to a premiere but to a second or third performance, which carries all the potential liabilities of a premiere with few of the publicity benefits.

“We were stunned by the number of orchestras that simply said no,” Falletta says. “That really surprised us.”

Eventually Long Beach did reach agreements with the symphony orchestras in Akron, Ohio, and Wichita, Kansas. The Akron Symphony gave its premiere, of Margaret Brouwer’s Symphony No. 1 (“Lake Voices”) last October. In March, the Kansas orchestra is to premiere a clarinet concerto by Bruce Adolphe. The Liebermann premiere next weekend is Long Beach’s project. With two of the commissioned trio still unperformed, the follow-up schedule is uncertain, but Falletta expects that Long Beach will perform Brouwer’s piece next season.

Composer Liebermann, just nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition last week, (his Concerto No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 36, was tapped) was a classmate of Falletta’s at Juilliard. “He is an important, compelling voice for reaching audiences today,” she says. “He’s vibrant and accessible, but not ‘neo’ anything.”

Like many composers, Liebermann is reluctant to characterize his colorful and tuneful music verbally. “If I could put it in words, I probably wouldn’t be putting it in music,” he says. “I have been described as one of the New Tonalists, which I prefer to Neo-Romantic.

“I do think there are a lot of progressive elements in my music that are not immediately obvious. But in certain segments of the musical world, if they hear a melody, their minds shut off and they refuse to believe anything intellectual could be going on.”

Liebermann was speaking by phone from England, where he was vacationing after conducting flutist James Galway, harpist Hyun-Sun Na and the London Mozart Players in a recording of his Concerto for Flute and Harp for BMG Classics. At 36, Liebermann is one of a rare breed: a full-time, self-supporting classical composer who has been doing little else all of his adult life.

“I started piano lessons when I was about 8 years old and began writing little pieces soon after,” he recalls. “When I was about 13, I decided I wanted to be a composer, though I don’t quite remember why. I had my first piece published when I was 15 [a piano sonata], and it is still in print and has been recorded twice.”

For his Long Beach commission, Liebermann turned to a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. He had already composed a piece inspired by Poe’s “Domain of Arnheim’--”a superbly crafted 18-minute Straussian tone poem, colorful and richly textured,” according to James Oestreich’s New York Times review of the premiere by Gerard Schwarz and the New York Chamber Symphony--which he expects to match with “Loss of Breath” and a future piece in a Poe trilogy.

“Poe is one of the few authors I’ve actually read complete,” Liebermann says. “The interesting thing is, once you get past the well-known ones, there are all these strange stories. This one is meant to be a parody of the type of stories about catastrophes overcome that appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. Its humor is very dark but also sort of [like the Strauss prankster] Till Eulenspiegel.

“In musical terms, it gave me the opportunity to do a lot of outrageous things with the orchestra. I’m not hugely into programmatic music as a concept, but I was able to derive a purely musical form from the story which can be appreciated without any knowledge of the narrative.”

But if you are interested in the plot, Liebermann will be reading the story and signing CDs at the Long Beach Borders store on Thursday.

An important element of this commissioning project is bringing the composers into the community for outreach and educational events. That is one of the exciting aspects of the project for Liebermann.

“I haven’t anticipated a premiere as eagerly as this in a long time,” he confides. “This is a very special piece and a very special project for me.”

Though a composer who has been comparatively successful at getting his music played and recorded, Liebermann knows well the obstacles on the road to second performances, even with a commission and funding in hand. His operatic treatment of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” which had its premiere in 1996 in Monte Carlo, had been co-commissioned by Opera Pacific, but plans to present it in Orange County were jettisoned early in the short and controversial regime of former Opera Pacific general manager Patrick Veitch.

“They dropped the ball big time on that,” Liebermann says. “They flew me out for a weekend to reassure me that everything was going well, and then a new director came in and suddenly it was out. They had a $150,000 grant to produce it, and then received another $100,000 from the NEA after canceling it because they forgot to withdraw their application.

“I was not happy about that whole situation because they hung up other opportunities to produce it.”

It’s taken three years to get an American premiere of the two-act opera, which will come in February 1999, courtesy of the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee.

A documentary film on the making of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” now in the editing process, should be released to coincide with that production.

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“LOSS OF BREATH,” Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, JoAnn Falletta, conductor. Terrace Theater, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Date: Saturday, 8 p.m. Prices: $15 to $48. Phone: (562) 436-3203.