Veteran Film Composers Offer Energy

Considering their ages--and such consideration is very often irrelevant in any area of the arts--five of the seven principals in the just-concluded 1998 UC Santa Barbara New Music Festival, called “Film Composers: The Whole Picture,” might be expected to be complacent, nostalgic writers glorying in their past successes.

No such thing.

In the third and fourth concerts closing the seventh annual June event, festival director William Kraft, an active film music writer and conductor, together with veterans David Raksin, 85, Elmer Bernstein, 76, Leonard Rosenman, 73, and Laurence Rosenthal, 71, demonstrated intense thoughtfulness and considerable youthfulness--and energy--in their appearances here in Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall at UCSB.

Naturally, and even with the scheduling of recent as well as historical works by themselves and others--John Corigliano, Franz Waxman, Toru Takemitsu, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, John Williams, Stephen Endelman and Miklos Rozsa--on these programs, the emphasis was on the achievements of the past, mostly in work completed in the 1940s through 1960s. Not surprisingly, this became, at its conclusion, a very brief retrospective of the music of Raksin, to whom the bulk of the final program on Friday night was dedicated.

Two extravagantly gifted jazz pianists, Mike Lang and Bob Florence, closed the festival by playing, together and separately, four Raksin songs from various films, ending with a probing rejuvenation of “Laura.” That was an appropriate and inspiring finale.

Earlier in the evening, Raksin himself played and sang “Laura” and explained at length the complicated process of fitting music to film in connection with the 1950 UPA cartoon “Giddyap.” The evening began with a recent high point in the still-bright career of 69-year-old Andre Previn, his ear-opening settings of four poems by Toni Morrison.

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These songs are deep, brilliant and provocative; too bad they were so middlingly performed by soprano Kerry Walsh, pianist Jeremy Haladyna (associate director of the festival) and cellist Hugh Livingston.

Elmer Bernstein’s “Toccata for Toy Trains” (1975), a joyous and irresistible showpiece for winds, piano and percussion, kept the audience’s juices flowing at mid-program. The performers--who seemed not to be from either the new-music ensembles of UCSB or UC San Diego, players mostly present on these last two nights--were clearly having as much fun as the listeners. Bernstein conducted and spoke briefly beforehand.

Rosenman’s “Looking Back at Faded Chandeliers,” one of the “Pierrot Lunaire”-inspired works commissioned by the Arnold Schoenberg Institute and first heard there in early 1990, closed the Friday concert. With the composer conducting, soprano Walsh delivering the complicated vocal part easily and pungently and five members of the UCSD ensemble Sirius assisting, “Looking Back” sounded like an important and articulate work unjustly neglected. More hearings, please.

Kraft’s “Gallery ‘83,” with the composer conducting the Sirius sextet--flute, violin, clarinet, cello, piano/celesta, percussion--also demands re-hearings based on its substance, achievement and density; this is a piece that holds the listener through invention, resource and tightness.

On the other hand, one probably would not choose to re-encounter Richard Rodney Bennett’s Divertimento for Two Pianos, a derivative and empty pop-pourri of small substance, played here with little finesse and unreliable ensemble by Haladyna and Alfredo Oyaguez.

Nor would one want to rehear Laurence Rosenthal’s perfectly pleasant but overlong “Songs to the Beloved” (1998), a 43-minute setting of poems by Rumi. The music is innocuous, its parts idiomatic, yet the piece rambles, and to no positive effect. Lots of craft, small content. Steven Hofer was the able conductor.